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saladtheory / saladtheory.github.io

Salad Theory
Apache License 2.0
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Ice cannot be an ingredient #28

Open m93samman opened 4 months ago

m93samman commented 4 months ago

Let me begin by saying that I was a casual cube rule enjoyer until a coworker brought the salad theory up to me. I'm willing to convert, but I have one issue. One of your criticisms of the cube rule is that it has problems with bites being taken out of food that result in the definition changing. I agree that that is a problem, but you also have a problem with foods being reclassified, without a bite being taken. By your guidance, a glass of coke with ice in it is a salad. If I leave for a few hours and return to find that all the ice has melted, is my coke no longer a salad? I find this to be deeply troublesome, and I would urge you to revise your approach.

I think the problem is that ice is being considered an ingredient unique from water. If you believe that microwaving a caesar salad should not exclude it from being a salad, then freezing water and putting in water should not upgrade it into a low-entropy hyper-salad (temporarily). Ice and water are one ingredient, at different temperatures. This then pushes into a new territory - a glass of coke has multiple ingredients, including water. Do you consider a glass of coke a salad? If the answer is no, then all homogenous soups (fully blended with no heterogeneity) cannot be classified as salads. I propose that, from here, the solution is somewhere in arrangement entropy. While a salad can be mixed and rotate in any number of axes, a beverage or a soup does not have any meaningful ability to be mixed. Consider a blended tomato soup, a glass of coke, or a bowl of jello. None of these ought to be salads in my opinion, I think they all should be at a soupiness factor of 1 and be called strictly soup. Soup-Salad duality addresses this by saying that there is a "possible exception of the boundaries (foods which have a soupiness of exactly 0 or 1)".

Cheers.

robertefry commented 2 months ago

Likewise, if I take a green salad (anything leafy green usually put into salads, i.e. lettuce, rocket), and leave it a few days, it'll turn into compost. Is that no longer a salad? Or, by implication of your theorem (leaving a salad should not change it's salad-ness), that a green salad was never a salad in the first place?

m93samman commented 2 months ago

Compost is not in the realm of food anymore, I don't think that applies? I'm only getting at the fact that a phase change should not count as a new ingredient, especially if the phase change is unstable like ice.