PrintThe Incompatible Food Triad problem
George Hart has been pondering this question for years:
"Can you find three foods such that all three do not go together (by any reasonable definition of foods "going together") but every pair of them does go together?"
He's created a webpage to discuss it: www.georgehart.com/triad.html
A couple of suggestions he's received are lemon, tea, and milk and chicken, chocolate, and honey, but manages to shoot them down. (Indeed, the person who suggested the second one then found a recipe on Kraft.com that uses chicken, chocolate and honey -- sounds really gross to me.)
What do Serious Eaters think? Can you come up with three foods that go well with each other, but would mean culinary disaster if all three met in one dish?
(PS: I found out about this problem via Growabrain, http://growabrain.typepad.com/).
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2 Comments:
If I think about this quasi-mathematically, I am forced to think that the question is an unsolvable conundrum. Essentially, you are asking if there exists a three element set where EVERY two-element subset is related (in this case "goes together") but where the original trio isn't. Mathematically, it's impossible.
For instance, in the examples you shared, I would argue that milk and lemon don't "go together," that is, unless you like curdled milk. So that trio breaks down. Chicken, chocolate, and honey may not sound appetizing to you, but I could easily imagine a Mexican molé being made out of that trio. In that case, whether or not the dilemma is resolved is subject to the opinion of the arbiter.
In other words, I don't think that there is an objective way to answer this. We can come up with a trio that *seems* to fit but is bound to be accepted as interesting or avant garde by someone. The question does, however, cause one to come up with some interesting trios while trying to answer it!
Dominic
the zen kitchen
dvchurch at 12:45AM on 02/02/08
This is making me crazy... I WANT to think of such a triad, but they all break down, mostly at the cultural level (e.g. unlike myself, Elvis supposedly DID believe that peanut butter, bananas, and bacon are a workable group). Anything I could think of was purely culturally bound.
mongoose at 4:38PM on 02/03/08