THE INCOMPATIBLE FOOD TRIAD

2009-10-26T10:15:00.003-05:00

I've written on this before, but it seems like a more in-depth examination of the incompatible food triad is a good way to start the "new" blog. For those who haven't heard this before, the incompatible food triad is a puzzle where the objective is to identify three foods, any two of which go together but all three together do not go. Pretty simple but think about it for a beat, if you never have before; it's a neat problem and it's one of those black holes of a logic puzzle where the more you think about it, the more complicated it gets. I plan to analyze that here.

So I did some research. The puzzle originates with Wilfred Sellers, an analytic philosopher on whom Justin had a huge crush in college. For the record, the analytics were obsessed with analyzing language and what it means to use language certain ways and so on. Units of language can be analyzed for meaning.

There are a few "classic" solutions to the puzzle:

salted cucumbers, sugar, and yogurt
orange juice, gin, and tonic
lemon, cocoa, and curry

And the only person I ever posed the question to and had an immediate solution said greens, whipped cream, and sweet potato pie.

I think there are some obvious problems with all these solutions. The first solution has gross all over it. Orange juice, gin, and tonic sounds like a drink I might actually like. And I can't begin to comprehend some of the two-food combinations in the third. So we have some questions of taste afoot, but I'm going to set personal taste aside for a moment and think about Brandon's solution: greens, whipped cream, and sweet potato pie. (You'll have to excuse the excessive quotations from here on out.) What does it mean for these things to "go" "together"? There are two levels of meaning there: go as in they taste good "together" (the taste issue), and that they combine to be "together." In the classic solutions, it was implied that an individual food was more like an ingredient than a complete food, like sweet potato pie; then again, salted cucumbers is really two foods. It's sufficient to say that whipped cream is combined with sweet potato pie when it goes on top, or when it goes on top of greens (gross, but we're leaving taste out of this). But in order for sweet potatoes, greens, and whipped cream to be combined together in a manner approaching that of ingredients in a larger dish, they'd have to be all piled on top of each other in an unappetizing mess that even Brandon probably wouldn't eat.

So what does it mean to combine foods? If two of the foods are liquids and one is a solid, can they really go "together" if the consumer drinks the liquids and eats the food? Do they all need to be consumed together in one bite? Returning to the "go" part of "go together," can the foods truly be said to "go" if they can't all be consumed together in one bite? And when we say "go," do we mean that most people would find that they "go" together or that one single person with a specific taste would eat it? Does the level of acceptability (go-togetherness?) have to branch across cultures? Is it acceptable for a triad to work in one culture but not another? And of course when we say "go," do we mean that it tastes good or that it could ostensibly be eaten?

I have a solution to the incompatible food triad, but it's the kind of bullshit answer that doesn't really answer the question. The purpose of the incompatible food triad, as posed by Wilfred Sellers, is not really to find three foods, any two of which go together but all three together don't. It's to get people to think about specificity of language, and how a seemingly simple logic puzzle unravels due to how we use and think about language and units of language. There can't be a solution to the incompatible food triad not because of the way food works, but because of the way language works.

Or I haven't thought about it hard enough. Solutions welcome!

ELISE MAKES WORDS

THE INCOMPATIBLE FOOD TRIAD