This is one of those gender vs sex dealies.
Food is not a social construct. But meals are.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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ruh roh what if sex is also a social construct
nah not going down that rabbit hole
(wonder why we chose to group biological factors XYZ to determine those classes instead of classes based on ABC tho...)
"Food" is a social construct in the same way as every label we put on a thing is a social construct. "Chair" is a social construct. (The universe didn't know what a "chair" was before humans started making and naming chairs.) "Tree" is a social construct. (Any physical thing you pick apart enough is particles (and I'm definitely oversimplifying here) and by giving it a human-made label like "tree", we're imposing something that wouldn't otherwise be there.) "Particles" are a social construct! (They're very much an abstraction of what's actually going on. Even the math we use to understand things like quantum mechanics is just our way of thinking about something that may or may not "exist" but if it does, definitely isn't the same as our "thoughts" about it.)
All words are social constructs, but I think there's at least one more layer at which "everything is a human construct." Even before we give something a name, we've already made the decision to distinguish it from a "background" as a distinct "thing." (A sufficiently alien mind might, if it encountered earth, consider all of earth "atomic" and "indivisible" to the point that the idea of "a human" wouldn't make sense to it. It's not like there's any empty space between our skin and the soup of amosphere we constantly live in, so in what sense am I a separate thing from the rest of earth?)
So, yeah, "food" is a social construct, but humans are very much removed from "reality" by an opaque ocean of social constructs.
All that said, I wouldn't say that "food" is a social construct in any way that, say, a "planet" or a "fork" or a "rock" or a "human" isn't.
awesome, this is the what i was lookin for is was is