I’m fine with their first consideration:

> A salad must be a mixture of greens.

The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively. There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?

> Mathematics is the study of precisely imagined things. It's about imagining something so precisely that your idea of it is fully defined. There's no space for opinion or interpretation. Two mathematicians thinking about the same mathematical object, defined in the same way, are not thinking about two versions of it. They're actually thinking about the same object.

- Rob Miles

Any time I read something like this post, I can't help but think that it's people mimicking the language of mathematics because they don't understand its purpose. To them, math seems like pedantry, constantly obsessing about minor details that are seemingly irrelevant. When in reality, that obsession with full and complete definitions in math serves a purpose.

This discussion of salads serves no purpose. In fact, it's arguably meant to be confusing.

Today I am especially grateful that I work with cool people.

You have to be able to toss a salad for it to be a salad, no? They tried too hard to make pizza salad…

If you apply information theory to food and get some interesting results. https://github.com/lucianmarin/fit

Gosh, people in comments are so annoying. I find all the efforts put in formulating a salad theory rather amusing, frankly.

Yeah, sometimes a feature-rich salad just turns into a mess. Less is more with ingredients.

An "Italian" from most sub shops definitely qualifies as soup after all the oil and vinegar. I almost drowned once trying to eat a Subway Italian BMT.

By this standard, I could call myself a vegetarian starting today. Haha

pedantry/ˈped(ə)ntrē/

Pedantry is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.

  Mathematics is an excessive, boastful, or annoying focus on minor details, formal rules, and trivial points of learning.