this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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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 any into your soffritto.
EDIT:
Tomato is also dominated by oxalic acid, not malic, citric, (typical fruit acids) or acetic (fermented/overripe). Oxalic acid is in parsley, chives, spinach, beans, lettuce, that kind of stuff. "It's sour" isn't sufficient to describe a taste profile, our tongues may not tell them apart but our noses definitely do.
I think it should be possible to break the culinary categorisation down to chemistry. That doesn't tell you anything about the "why" but it's definitely not random and definitely not all in our heads.
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.
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.
Neither the biology nor culinary mappings are arbitrary, they have their rhyme and reason. Also biology would be the alternate one? Because the culinary definitions were definitely first.
Did you know that there's quite extreme disagreements 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. Neither side says that the other is wrong -- they just don't care for it.
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.