I've said it once and I'll say it again. I know it when I see it. We don't need to classify. Classification will only lead to economic ruin and anarchy! Aliens will be poring through our databanks in an effort of digital archaeology and discover these endeavours.

"They're one of few species to finally reconcile food topology and taxonomy but like the rest, they succumbed to the madness it brought upon their society."

But why?

Wrong visualization method. They should have used a Ternary plot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_plot

A ternary plot only works if the three variables add up to the same constant.

There's no way to fit salad (0,1,0), soup (1,0,0), and steak (0, 0.5, 0) on the same ternary plot because the first two points add up to 1 and the last one add up to 0.5.

Well obiously they aren’t showing “stake” and “soup” those are binary classifications. They are showing stake-like, soup-like and salate-like, which you can normalize to one. If you actually want to keep the last axis which is essentially a comment on how much the item fits within the space you can use dot color or size though I’d argue that it’s actually pretty much irrelevant for this comparison.

So this is the highest use of the .xyz domain?

I think it is.

Since the three axes do not sum to one, there is something clearly missing within their model.

Hmmm. I think a triangular graph would be a better way of representing the data -- this would also expose the hole at the centre of their model; that there are no foods which are equal mixtures of soup, salad and sandwich.

I feel this is an important avenue for further research, and I seek funding to discover the triple-S food...

There's some vegetable broths that are solid enough to make the attempt, especially if you toast a bap and hollow the middle out a little.

Panzanella can be tuned to the triple point soup=salad=sandwich.

Apparently fruit salad is as much a salad as a piece of steak.

Sushi is as sandwichy as a hot dog, but a bit more salady.

Pretty sure this is the path to madness.

So I'm guessing:

Soup = liquid ingredients

Salad = solid ingredients randomly mixed together

Sandwich = solid ingredients put into a structure

Error, taco salad in a corn tortilla bowl is !not sandwich.

Now here is another dichotomy.

How about exploring and graphing the variances between dishes and cultures that that chops the food for the consumer and the ones that are serve the food in whole pieces.

What about pulled pork, Georgia style (with coleslaw)? Add hot sauce - do we have the holy grail, the food item suspended gloriously at the heart of soup-salad-sandwich space?

I love it. What is it?

Some background for the classification:

https://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/towards-a-theo...

All food has a certain soup-iness, salad-iness, and sandwich-iness. This plots some common food on these axes.

3D data visualisation with rotation and zoom. Nicely done. Makes me long for a soup sandwich.