@Satsuma @wallhackio @gaditb @Lady I don't know, I mean I think on its own it's a pretty *bad* food, but I think that of surströmming too and I assume most people would call that food, of some kind or other.
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@aschmitz @wallhackio @gaditb @Lady i think if a country has a named holiday for the first day that a food is available each year that involves people queuing outside the grocery store at seven in the morning and the whole stock selling out in under ten minutes we can, in fact, safely assume this is a semantically reasonable answer to “what is your favorite food” (cite: https://www.courthousenews.com/supply-of-smelly-fermenting-herring-not-meeting-swedish-demand/ )
@Satsuma @aschmitz @wallhackio @gaditb ok but we have holidays for wheat
@Lady @wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb these holidays do not involve eating plain flour
@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb do you think wheat is a food but not flour??? flour is just crushed wheat
@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz Wheat and flour are both food-ingredients, and not food themselves. (The categories are very much not exclusive.)
There are foods that technically people will identify the food-ingredient form and the food form, and call them the same -- pastas, bulghur and stuff, beans, tea and coffee, etc. -- because there is effectively only one way to cook them (with water) into food.
Flour is different here because it has many common uses and so doesn't have an effective primary "this is what cooked flour is" form to identify it with.
@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz (So to answer about salad -- it's a food composed of multiple ingredients, and those ingredients (I'm skipping dressing and herbs/spices for now, that would make this sentence more complicated than this parenthetical already does) are also, individually, themselves foods.)
@gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz but it can give you e coli, so it is poisonous, so not food
@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz I disagree with the "it can be dangerous and therefore it is not food".
I think food is a social construct.
@wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb @Lady i also think food is a social construct but i think one reason we construct things as ingredients and not foods is because there are requisite steps to render them safe and/or palatable and/or nutritionally bioavailable which are typically taken before consumption. in flours case it’s heavier on the palatable side of things than the safe of course—the fact that lots of people eat raw cookie dough is precisely why the CDC has a page explaining that raw flour is may contain e coli
but raw meat can be rendered into a food purely through the application of heat (though i also recommend adding seasonings. or at least salt)
@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @Lady Why are "safe" and "nutritionally bioavailable" in your list of considerations? Why not "palatable" alone?
(I might consider adding "digestible", but I'd only think about actually deciding whether to or not after I had at least one example of something that was "palatable" but not "digestible" to think about as a tangible case.)
@gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio @Lady Are there things we'd consider food that have *no* bioavailable nutrition? (Arguably water has only the one thing going for it, which may or may not be considered a nutrient, but assume minimal water content of other things doesn't count.) Short of pica, I can't really think of anything? (n.b. that the Wikipedia's topline definition of food is close to mine, though not everyone seems to agree.)
