The spectrum of food formality

publish Backlink: Musings on everything else

Opened 2022-03-31.

Shower thought: All foods have a hidden objective property of “formality,” expressing how comfortable you’d be eating it in presence of someone you really wanted to impress.

Imagine you’re eating lunch with your mayor. The environment around you is an ambient, upscale cafe, somewhere downtown. Now, imagine you lean in to take a bite of:

• a sensibly-sized forkful of tuna, versus
• a sideways bite of soggy single-tortilla-wrapped taco?

Clearly these foods have different food formality (foodmality?) levels.

Foods ranked by formality

Rule for applying adjectives: acceptable modifiers for food are those which do not threaten the edibility of the food. (e.g. “soggy”, “crispy” are acceptable; “stale”, “moldy” are not. “Overcooked” is a bit of a grey zone so let’s disqualify similar modifiers).

• 90/100 Filet mignon.
• 80/100 Cup of coffee (depends on context).
• 10/100 Soggy taco.