Comment on Strawberries are nuts 🍓
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 1 month ago
To me arguing over which fruit belongs in which category is a prime example of people arguing over shadows in Plato’s cave. Not that it’s a waste of time or anything but sometimes people act like tomatoes won’t grow if you call them vegetables. Like at the end of the day it’s just humans developing a system to make sense of nature rather than discovering an inherent, pre-existing system.
I totally agree. It is completely nonsense to say. In other languages it is different. I just know some Spanish, but they don’t have a word for berries or nuts, it is all just fruit. (Forrest fruit for berries or dried fruit for nuts) but they don’t call potatoes vegetables, but “tuberculo”. Interesting difference, which i guess is because they have another climate and other plants.
We do just call it a vegetable in my language.
Bayas y nueces… Tubérculo is closer to the botanical definition because it is a tuber (storage organ) and not a fruit (like most vegetables). And I would think that tubérculo could be any tuber vegetable, not just papas/patatas
Thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that nuez would only refer to walnut. And that an almond would not be a nuez.
Is it a country specific thing because I usually see frutos del bosque in Spain?
I guess things can have multiple names, too. In German you would also say Waldfrüchte (forest fruits) to mixed berries, but they are still Beeren (berries) as well. If you search for “postre de bayas” or “pastel de bayas” many recipes pop up. And sure, Spanish is obviously a diverse language with the divide between Spanish from Spain and from Latin America.
Disclaimer: I’m part of the scientific bubble so that’s why I may here more terms that are botanical in Spanish ;)
Technically, the pre-existing system could be evolutionary biology. I’m just saying that in some cases, a little bit of pedantry is enjoyable. It’s an acquired taste, maybe
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
The core of the matter is that we have multiple, mutually incompatible schemes sharing in part the same terminology. Biology is not cooking, both fields care about vastly different things thus the categorisation scheme is different, that’s the end of it. Culinarily, tomatoes have too much umami to be fruit. Botanically peppermint is an aromatic, I recommend you not put it into your soffritto.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Oh, this is actually a perfect example of the arbitreity of mapping systems!
A looong time ago on reddit, I got into an argument with someone who was doing that thing where you confuse the map for the object itself. We were mostly talking about the chemistry table. But anyway, he just could not see how a change in motivation, that is what the map designer finds useful, could change how the map is arranged.
I mean, I don’t think this would convince him: he would just say the culinary version isn’t real. But still, I really like it.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mean that’s a pretty big difference right?
Like, the periodic tables mapping isn’t arbitrary or alternate.
Like you can’t actually map the periodic a different way and it’s in a sense “self evident” in a way arbitrary mappings aren’t.
The periodic table itself is a kind of proof of quantum theory, or at least, strong supporting evidence. While it can be displayed differently, actually couldn’t be arranged differently and the things we know about physics hold true.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Ah, there he is!
Just kidding.
The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn’t any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn’t really affect its arbitreity. The elements don’t have value unto themselves, they just are.
And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you’re doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Neither the biology nor culinary mappings are arbitrary.
Did you know that there’s quite extreme agreements on what metals are? Chemists will tell you one thing and not be particularly unified in their response around the topic of semimetals, while astrophysicists have a very simple definition of metals: Anything that has more protons than helium.
Who is right? This has nothing to do with metaphysics (I’ve read a bit down the thread) as in “what is beyond physics, god, and stuff”, but how we interpret our (scientific) observations. Neither definition of metals is more correct than the other, they’re both maps drawn by scientists caring about vastly different things.
Back to the periodic table itself: Defining elements by protons has quite some predictive power but at the same time it’s a vast oversimplification of what actually goes on, ask any quantum chemist. It is rooted in quite hard science, but that doesn’t make it ground reality. Actual reality is something we can’t observe because to observe anything we first have to project it into our minds. All perception is modelling: Ask any neuroscientist. Or, for that matter, Plato.
stray@pawb.social 1 month ago
I agree with what you mean in kind of a broad-strokes way, but as individuals our subjective experiences of flavors can vary pretty wildly. There’s genetics, neurology, age, and habit/experience that influence our taste in terms of actually sensing the chemicals. Then there’s what we see, taste, and smell just prior or during tasting that severely impact our interpretation of that chemical sense.
P00ptart@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“Botanically” “culinary” “terminology” “biology” and then you say umami seriously. Which is entirely made up.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33580387/
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You never had tomato pie? It would likely change your idea of what too much savoriness is.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I haven’t but that sounds like a pie not a cake.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Well, not all pies are desserts for sure, but a tomato pie is, unless you deviate from the usual recipes.
Besides, you didn’t say that a dessert has to be a cake.
There’s also tomato jams, compote, and you can do a tomato cake mind you, a tomato cake is really more like banana bread, where it’s a flavoring more than the star of the show.
Point is that tomatoes can definitely serve in the same role as “fruit”, just like some things that are sweeter can be used in savory dishes.
It’s about the preparation, not the ingredient. I mean, look at bacon jam. Not a dessert, but it’s a savory and sweet spread that’s used in the same was as fruit based jams. Onion jam is in the same range (and, as a side note, there’s also onion and tomato pie which is more of a savory dish than a dessert, despite being fairly sweet anyway).
From a culinary standpoint, there are few ingredients that are fully excluded from dessert territory by virtue of having strong savory taste. There’s also not many excluded from entrees purely because they’re sweet. It’s all a wonderful spectrum of sweet and savory