GoKawiilBackground
In our office, we sometimes enjoy pedantic conversations where we attempt to properly define ambiguous terms. Naturally, when the sandwich controversy took the world by storm around 2016[3], we were interested.
We talked a lot about sandwiches, then went beyond. The sandwich debates spun off numerous side discussions regarding the categorization of other foods. Fatefully, one coworker raised the question of whether a salad could be called a pizza.
The answer to that question shocked and appalled us. Inescapably, a pizza was actually a salad.
Many heated lunchtime conversations ensued. We attacked the problem from different angles. We debated the merits of novel definitions. People got sick of it and avoided some of us at lunch.
But the truth could not be avoided. Begrudgingly, the office pedants were forced to reach an agreement: All edible foods[1] are salads.
We wrote up our conclusions in an internal document in May 2017. We were content to keep this dark knowledge to ourselves, but alas. Spurred by the release of food category theories which clearly misrepresent the nature of salads[4], the time has come to share our findings with the world.
Derivation
Assumptions
Any sane definition of a salad must at least include foods which a typical English-speaking person would colloquially refer to as a “salad”. A typical English-speaking person would consider the following foods “salads”: caesar salad, fruit salad, chicken salad, pasta salad, tuna salad, taco salad, and an untossed caesar salad. A good salad definition should be concise. Fewer terms and conditions on the definition of a salad is more elegant (and by Occam’s razor, more likely to be correct).
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