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How many ingredients does it take to call it a salad? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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My significant other ate cucumbers and onion with some ranch. I called it a cucumber onion salad. She says there aren't enough ingredients to call it a salad, because "it takes multiple ingredients". I pointed out she had three and asked what the minimum is. She refuses to answer so I ask Lemmy.

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[โ€“] 54 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

So teeeeechnically, a salad is a dish composed of mixed ingredients. You could make the argument that you mix any two set of chopped ingredients and bingo bongo, it's a salad.

However, I like to think that dishes' ingredients aren't a taxonomic thing, they're a probabilistic thing. In other words, there's no such thing as "not salad" or "salad", only shades of saladness.

  • Serve it cold? Ok it's saladier

  • It's made up of chopped ingredients? Saladier still

  • Those ingredients are mostly vegetables? Getting pretty saladish

  • They're mixed together? Even more salad like

  • They've got some sort of dressing mixed in? Now it's very likely a salad!

... and so on. To me, your SO'a dish has a pretty high Salad Probability^tm

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  • [โ€“] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Is there anyway to convert a Salad Probability^tm into a Salad Factor score?

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Give me weights for the coefficients and I'll construct a matrix

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Here's some example weights for a salad factor

    Lettuce - 10

    Spinach - 9

    Arugula - 7

    Cabbage - 7

    Tomato- 6

    Carrots- 6

    Cucumber - 5

    Onion - 4

    Olives (black) 4

    Anchovies - 1

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There are a few missing points in there IMO, like which of your ingredient is cooked, or how are they sliced? Graped carrots rises the score, but cook them and it's less likely to be a salad. Diced radish? Not in my salad, especially not cooked, but thinly sliced raw radish definitely belongs. And don't even get me started on tomatoes.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Damn, I'm not sure the two are compatible then. The salad factor score is meant to be super easy so people don't get overwhelmed by all the possibilities and variations.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What we need is a salad categorizing multilayer neural network

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    It wouldn't be hard to train on obvious salads, but what about the non obvious ones? Who do we trust to properly label these as salad or not a salad?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    I think this is one of those words / concepts where one needs to invoke Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" idea. You're not going to find some exact set of criteria that define what people do and don't consider a salad. They instead have a "family resemblance".

    Your probably idea is not a bad way of describing how that works.

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