@wallhackio @aschmitz sure i mean if you take flour & water and apply mechanical processing & heat you’ll get food but that’s just how ingredients work

@Satsuma @wallhackio Yes, though I'd argue that basically any ingredient that has its own nutritional value is food (technically, assuming someone has actually ever eaten it for nutrition, I guess). Like food dye probably isn't? But flour is food, it could just be a lot better by preparing it @Lady's way.

@aschmitz @Satsuma @wallhackio flour is a lot better if you butter it and sweeten it and serve it with mixed with eggs

@aschmitz @wallhackio @Lady «Flour doesn't look like a raw food, but most flour is raw. That means it hasn't been treated to kill germs that cause food poisoning, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Salmonella. These harmful germs can contaminate grain while it's still in the field or flour while it's being made.

Steps like grinding grain and bleaching flour don't kill harmful germs—and these germs can end up in flour or baking mixes you buy at the store. You can get sick if you eat unbaked dough or batter made with flour containing germs. Germs are killed only when flour is baked or cooked.»

@Satsuma @aschmitz @wallhackio today i learned salad isn¦t food

@Satsuma @wallhackio @Lady The same (or at least very similar) is largely true of milk, which the vote seemed to largely conclude was food.

@Lady @wallhackio @aschmitz first of all, most people generally only consider cooked milk safe to eat, its just that cooking milk is required by law and thus the presumed default while this is not the case for flour

@Satsuma @aschmitz @wallhackio @Lady Yeah but if you're making cookie-dough-like-just-to-eat, iirc you can just put the flour in a pan and bake it with nothing else,
and then just safely use that (pateurized? is that technically pateurization?) to mix in and make the cookie-dough, then iirc I've heard that it'll still work and the flour will still function perfectly well as flour and stuff,

... and assuming that's all actually the case I still don't think people would distinguish between the de-germed flour and the germed flour? (No "wheat germ" pun intended here.)
Like I think the "is it food" answer would be the same for both.

@wallhackio @gaditb @Lady @aschmitz i think if it would be a borderline incoherent answer to the question of “what is your favorite food” that is because it is probably culturally in a different category (in milks case, that would be beverages and in flours case that would be ingredients)

@Satsuma @wallhackio @gaditb @Lady I don't know, I mean I think on its own it's a pretty *bad* food, but I think that of surströmming too and I assume most people would call that food, of some kind or other.

@aschmitz @wallhackio @gaditb @Lady i think if a country has a named holiday for the first day that a food is available each year that involves people queuing outside the grocery store at seven in the morning and the whole stock selling out in under ten minutes we can, in fact, safely assume this is a semantically reasonable answer to “what is your favorite food” (cite: https://www.courthousenews.com/supply-of-smelly-fermenting-herring-not-meeting-swedish-demand/ )

@Satsuma @aschmitz @wallhackio @gaditb ok but we have holidays for wheat

@Lady @wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb these holidays do not involve eating plain flour

@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb do you think wheat is a food but not flour??? flour is just crushed wheat

@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz Wheat and flour are both food-ingredients, and not food themselves. (The categories are very much not exclusive.)

There are foods that technically people will identify the food-ingredient form and the food form, and call them the same -- pastas, bulghur and stuff, beans, tea and coffee, etc. -- because there is effectively only one way to cook them (with water) into food.
Flour is different here because it has many common uses and so doesn't have an effective primary "this is what cooked flour is" form to identify it with.

@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz (So to answer about salad -- it's a food composed of multiple ingredients, and those ingredients (I'm skipping dressing and herbs/spices for now, that would make this sentence more complicated than this parenthetical already does) are also, individually, themselves foods.)

@gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz but it can give you e coli, so it is poisonous, so not food

@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz I disagree with the "it can be dangerous and therefore it is not food".

I think food is a social construct.

@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz

a piece of chicken breaded with a flour-milk-breadcrumbs-spices coating and fried in butter

@Lady @Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz

grasshopper

@wallhackio @aschmitz @Lady @gaditb grasshoppers are ingredients

@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @Lady Not specifying this was intentional, but thinking of "grasshopper" in the context of food I was thinking of the... dried? roasted? I don't remember, whole grasshopper---

EDIT: gosh DARN it, I meant "locust". I don't think this changes any consideration for anyone except me.

-- whole locust I was offered to eat and which a friend did,

and in the same vein as "rice" being uncooked a food-ingredient but cooked a food that we also call "rice" and we identify both of them together because there's an obvious canonical cooked form.
(Again, not mentioning that explicitly was intentional, because this is my framework of how to think of it and I didn't want to impose that on other people for their answer.)

@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @Lady Also to be clear, since I guess I can't answer my own polls --

my answer (MY answer, not "the answer I think other people should have even within my framework") to my first question is "not a food".

@aschmitz @gaditb @wallhackio @Lady i guess this does also raise the related question about whether the kosher status of the thing in question makes it food / not food or merely permissible / impermissible food which i believe is a distinction made about different types of edible locusts

@wallhackio @aschmitz @gaditb @Lady i also think food is a social construct but i think one reason we construct things as ingredients and not foods is because there are requisite steps to render them safe and/or palatable and/or nutritionally bioavailable which are typically taken before consumption. in flours case it’s heavier on the palatable side of things than the safe of course—the fact that lots of people eat raw cookie dough is precisely why the CDC has a page explaining that raw flour is may contain e coli

but raw meat can be rendered into a food purely through the application of heat (though i also recommend adding seasonings. or at least salt)

@Satsuma @wallhackio @aschmitz @Lady Why are "safe" and "nutritionally bioavailable" in your list of considerations? Why not "palatable" alone?

(I might consider adding "digestible", but I'd only think about actually deciding whether to or not after I had at least one example of something that was "palatable" but not "digestible" to think about as a tangible case.)

@wallhackio @gaditb @Lady @aschmitz because they eat chicken raw on purpose in japan, which doesn’t have salmonella and those two facts are generally considered related when explaining this to horrified americans who are quite sure raw chicken is Not A Food

@Lady @wallhackio @gaditb @aschmitz i mean i still think the key point is the cultural construction, but i think that safety is a driver for cultural constructions surrounding food

@Satsuma @Lady @wallhackio @aschmitz See I think that Americans (broadly) -- for those prior-established cultural reasons -- find raw chicken unpalatable on the face of it.

@gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio @Lady Are there things we'd consider food that have *no* bioavailable nutrition? (Arguably water has only the one thing going for it, which may or may not be considered a nutrient, but assume minimal water content of other things doesn't count.) Short of pica, I can't really think of anything? (n.b. that the Wikipedia's topline definition of food is close to mine, though not everyone seems to agree.)

@gaditb @wallhackio @Lady @aschmitz despite that, wikipedia does not describe flour as a food on its wikipedia page: «Flour is a powder used to make many different foods, including baked goods, as well as thickening dishes.»

@Satsuma @gaditb @wallhackio @Lady Hmm, but also "Flour also can be made from soybeans, arrowroot, taro, cattails, manioc, quinoa, and other non-cereal foodstuffs." (Also it doesn't describe flour as having mass, and yet it does, etc.)

@Satsuma @gaditb @wallhackio @aschmitz wiktionary calls it a food tho

@aschmitz @Satsuma @wallhackio @Lady Something that's purely flavoring and texture? if there is anything?

Or like, something SOMEONE would consider "food", even if not necessarily "we".

(Is there anyone with pica who considers the generally-non-food things they eat "food" or "palatable"? Or do they all just think of it as just a thing to chew on, like a pencil.)

@gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio @Lady Like I would consider food coloring edible but not food, I just don't think it has noteworthy nutrients (although maybe it often has some sort of solvent that does?). Guar gum, maybe? Olestra?

@aschmitz @gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio does charcoal count? i eat boldly charred splits on occassion

@Lady @gaditb @Satsuma @wallhackio I was wondering about that. I would guess that most people would say that just the carbon isn't food, though it could be a component of food? (Though I do have one former coworker who liked his toast thoroughly burnt, not sure what the carbon makeup was there but I'd bet it was high.)

@gaditb @aschmitz @wallhackio @Lady i dont think those are burnt enough to contain no nutritional content even if they are arguably burnt enough to be rendered unpalatable