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Axes of Salad Complexity

05/11/2009 - 17:43

After a furious session of blackboarding, we are pleased to present an incomplete^* collection of the axes of salad complexity:

Architectural: Complexity of construction
Conceptual: To what extent is this salad a metaphor?
Cultural: Number of cuisines included and effort made to fuse them
Financial: Expense of ingredients
Gustatory: Number of flavors sensed, and effort made to meld them
Logistical: Technical difficulty of preparation
Taxonomic: Number of ingredients

For each salad, the above should be graphed as a Radar Chart.

*Some uninteresting axes have been omitted, and some axes are yet to be discovered.

Food

Comments

Wed, 05/13/2009 - 00:43 — mrjones (not verified)

It had to be done...Online Tosser

Though you may change your axes, I wrote a functional, online tosser that generates radar charts which you can then publish. Check it out!

Tue, 05/12/2009 - 00:32 — Anonymous (not verified)

what about

non-salad salads? Where would 'prison tossed' salad go on the graph? At what point does a salad transition from one state to another, given the possible ingredient permutations? Is the caloric axis one of the uninteresting ones? It seems like it would become interesting as the graph fills in with datapoints. Perhaps there are physically impossible salads? Or salads that can only be replicated in lab conditions that are not naturally occuring?

Tue, 05/12/2009 - 14:40 — firebus

intriguing

tossed salad. is that emotional or sexual complexity? correctional?

i don't think "caloric complexity" is an interesting concept, but i agree that calories would be an interesting thing to track.

maybe complexity is the wrong word, maybe we're looking for a list of "meaningful salad continuums".

physically impossible salads would be in the realm of conceptual complexity i think - do we need a separate metaphysical or ontological axis?

salads requiring laboratory enviroments would be high on the technical complexity axis.