QT 104 – The Taxing World of Food Taxonomy

Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where hopefully we’re on time for the first time in a couple weeks, in order to discuss a fairly silly topic vaguely related to Monday’s post, and one that you may be surprised to find you have opinions on: Food Taxonomy. What is it, why does it matter, and why do I think you care about it?

It’s a Tax on Me

You have to run out of those puns eventually, Title Jon. Anyway, firstly, I want to answer the first question, as an Austrian nun once said that the beginning is a very good place to start.

A statement that SOUNDS more profound as long as you don’t acknowledge that the advice came from a musical.

What is “food taxonomy”? Well, it’s a term I personally use to refer to a kind of complicated thing, so let’s break it down. We all know what food is, so what, exactly, is a taxonomy? Now, I hang out with a lot of very intelligent people (read: nerds), so I know that a LOT of my friends could give you the functional definition of taxonomy, but I’m going to take a step back on it. Taxonomy comes from the Greek Taxis-nomia, or arrangement-distribution, and it refers to the organization of things into groups. The overwhelmingly well-known version of this is Linnaean Taxonomy, which is the system we use to organize animals. You know, all those fancy Latin words scientists use to be precise about what specific animal they’re talking to, and what other animals it’s related to? Ursus Arctos or Gulo Gulo or, as teenagers across America laughed at, homo erectus?

“Bye bye, gay guy”. - The peak of 14 year old wit.

Fun side joke: The other two names I picked were the scientific names for “brown bears” and Wolverines, both of which I have memorized because of how dumb they are: Ursus Arctos is (Latin for Bear) (Greek for Bear), so they’re called “Bear bears” in Latin, and gulo is Latin for “Glutton”, so Wolverines are called “Glutton Gluttons”, because they regularly kill prey that is MUCH larger than them, so presumably they just stuff their little murderous faces with it. Wolverines get even FUNNIER, as there are two subspecies of Wolverine: Old World Wolverines, named gulo gulo gulo, or North American wolverines, named gulo gulo luscus. The first one’s translation is obvious, but the second one is AMAZING. Luscus is Latin for half-blind/with one eye closed/one-eye. American wolverines are named  “The half-blind Double Gluttons” to distinguish them from their cousins, “the Triple Gluttons”

The history of taxonomies, and arguments on how they’re arranged. Early attempts were largely morphology-based (meaning they were based on how things looked/shared traits) which ran into a lot of problems. It is very easy, for instance, for someone to guess/figure out that broccoli and cauliflower are related, but much less likely for them to figure out they’re the same plant as cabbages. There’s a bunch of jokes about it in other realms with one of my favorites being that Plato, in an early attempt, gave a definition of Man as “A featherless biped”, to which Diogenes, original troll of philosophy, stormed into one of Plato’s lectures, and threw out a living bird that he had personally plucked, bellowing “BEHOLD, PLATO’S MAN”…to which Plato added the qualifier “with flat nails” to his definition.

Greetings, fellow human. It is I, normal Bir-BIR-YAN. Bryan.

Nowadays, the people involved have centuries of records, fossil dating, DNA testing, and all sorts of tools to make things more rigorous and accurate. But the field is much less developed in food, for a couple reasons.

You Can’t Just Put Food in Boxes. Except Donuts. And Pizza. And Pie…

This is where we hit the point where, as I was saying, you probably have opinions on food taxonomies. See, the way taxonomies WORK is that entities are parts of subgroups, which are parts of larger groups, which in turn are parts of LARGER groups, so on and so forth. A Tiger is a part of Genus Panthera, the “Big Cats” genus (Lions, Tigers, Jaguars, etc), which is in turn part of the family Felidae, or “Cats in general”, which are part of the Order Carnivora, with are part of the Class Mammalia, which are part of the subphylum Vertebrata. Or, to reverse the process: there are animals with back-bones, of which some are mammals. Some mammals eat meat, and some of those meat-eating animals are cats. Some cats are big, and some big cats are tigers.

“Some cats are tigers” is the kind of keen insight people come for every week.

It’s…not precisely an ELEGANT system, and changes to it can often leave different generations confused about things. (Like, I am almost certain when I went to school, “Vertebrate” was a phylum.) But it makes a kind of consistent sense. Food does not follow that same process quite as cleanly, which is why you sometimes see people engage in impromptu discussions on the best way to file foods taxonomically.

You know, with questions like “Is a Hot Dog a sandwich, or a taco?”

Or the surprise contestant: a form of gyro?

And maybe you can see the immediate issue: I noted earlier that earlier morphological taxonomies are fraught with problems…and that’s kind of the only option we HAVE for food. Like, sandwiches don’t have fossils, or genetics. Or at least….they didn’t. As food scholarship has become more advanced, more databases and pockets of knowledge become digitized and disseminated, there is a growing trend among cooks to refer to elements or influences in dishes as part of the dish’s ‘DNA’.

You can’t, for instance, discuss the Cuban Sandwich, without discussing Mojo pork, the citrus-marinated pork roast from Cuba that makes up one of the core ingredients to the sandwich. (since early versions of the sandwich were essentially created to use up left-over pork)  And just like with subspecies, you can see the same ideas come into play as food ‘evolves’: the two hearts of Cuban sandwich production in America are Miami and Tampa Florida, both seeking to replicate a dish invented in Cuba, itself a mixture of native and Spanish influences (the original ‘Cuban sandwich’ was cooked on much harder bread, and consisted of roast bird. The Spaniards are the ones who made the bread softer, and made it pork based. The Cuban sandwiches of Tampa are older in the US, since Tampa established its Cuban population decades before Miami, but they have also undergone a shift: the Cuban population of Tampa often lived and worked with Italian immigrants, so they incorporated Genoa Salami into the sandwich. Meanwhile, a large proportion of Miami Cubans came as a direct result of Castro’s rise to power in the 1950’s, and now outnumber Tampa…and they do NOT use salami, because the sandwich on Cuba does not. (Not that it is ‘against the rules’ to use salami or anything. it’s just that in the early 1900’s, putting three different meats on a sandwich would have made it a little too pricey to be an easy street-food for Cuban workers.)

“Look, I’m fine with roast pork and ham on the same sandwich, but MORE pig meat? Too rich for my blood.”

 To return to our earlier example, the hot dog on a bun certainly LOOKS more like a taco, since American hot dog buns surround the dog on three sides, there’s only one piece of bread (unless the bun’s connecting strip tears) and they’re almost always served hot-dog-and-toppings-side up, but two of those qualities are also fulfilled by an open-faced sandwich, or Swedish smorgasbord, (a word that literally translates to “sandwich-table”) And if you look at the original version of hot dogs, German Wurst on buns, you can clearly see that it’s much more sandwich-like.

This one is markedly snail-like

Indeed, one of the first ‘frankfurter’ vendors in America referred to his creation as “frankfurter sandwiches”, just as hamburgers were once “hamburger sandwiches”. So, problem solved, right? Clearly, a hot dog (and I don’t know why, but I have been hyphenating that phrase every time, and then having to go back and delete it.)  is a sandwich: it is descended from a sandwich, it meets sandwich characteristics, boom boom boom.

But I think you can have a more nuanced answer, it’s just one we currently lack the linguistic precision for. To go back a bit, one of the steps I skipped in the taxonomy of the tiger is the suborder Feliformia, which includes all cats…but it also includes Hyenas, mongooses, civets (the cat-like creatures that poop the most expensive coffee),  and several other groups. It’s counter-form, “Caniformia” includes all dogs, but also things like raccoons, wolverines, and walruses. So some people  argue that “the hot dog is in the sandwich FAMILY, but it is not a sandwich anymore. It’s just a hot-dog.” And that’s an argument I can get behind. Just as a tiger is not a Mongoose, or a lynx is not a member of Panthera, meaning it is not a “big cat”, despite being a large cat, so to is a hot dog not a sandwich. It’s a hot dog.

The Heel of the Bread

One of the questions I asked at the start is “why does it matter”? And to a lot of people, it won’t. But that’s true of most things. On a certain level, there is probably some value in having an organized system of food Taxonomy, which various people are working on. One thing I do think it helps with is the idea of expanding your own cooking, by exploring related genera or classes to the foods you already  like. Jim Gaffigan used to tell a joke about how it’s functionally impossible to get the ‘wrong thing’ at Mexican places, because it’s the same 5 ingredients arranged differently. If you ordered a tostada and got a taco, just snap the taco shell so it lays flat. By the same token, if you like Carnitas on tacos, you will PROBABLY like them on sopes, in tortas, huaraches, and several other Mexican food varieties. It serves as an easy point of connection: there is a flatbread called Lahmacun (which I learned of as “Lahmahjoun”) which consists of a flat round dough topped with minced meat and a spiced mixture of minced vegetables and herbs. It is frequently called “(BALKAN OR MIDDLE-EASTERN  NATION) Pizza” , because you may not grasp the idea of “Lebanese flat-bread with spiced meat”, but you GET “middle-eastern pizza”  It’s not strictly accurate, but saying “it’s basically pizza” is a way to get people to try it who might be hesitant. And I think that’s worth something. Using food taxonomy to help people understand dishes they might otherwise reject.

Kids especially will try most foods at least a little bit if you call them “pizza”.

So there may not be a Linnaean taxonomy for food, but you can create your own rough approximation. Or wait until I get enough caffeine and free-time to form one. But in either case, having a system to discuss and relate foods to each other is useful. And the absence of it can be frustrating.

MONDAY: JON WHIPS UP ONE OF HIS BROTHER’S FAVORITES DISHES, USING NOTHING BUT CHICKEN, MAGIC ALCOHOL, AND MUSHROOMS.

THURSDAY: DO YOU HONESTLY EXPECT ME TO WRITE A POST ON CHRISTMAS EVE? YOU MONSTERS.