Defending Necessary Arbitrary Choices

With my last post, I created an elegant definition of Guacamole and Smashed Avocado. Those definitions don't really fall in line with the historical background of Guacamole, although the sources I could find for making that declaration were less than ideal. However, the definition I created does seem to me to fit the modern understanding as Guacamole is described as a 'value-added' product from the original avocado, implying that it is more complex than just mushing it up.


The question I got back from Sweetness, who liked my solution, was why is it when 3 ingredients are combined with avocado is guacamole created? It seems like 3 is a completely arbitrary choice to be a defining characteristic of something, so why not 2, 5, or 10? It's true there is no real reason to pick 3 that can be pointed to other than the support that I gave that Smashed Avocado was based on its simplicity so the number of ingredients should be indicative of that simplistic nature.


Yet anchoring my definition to 3 and 3 being arbitrary doesn't make the definition wrong or even bad. There is a necessity in many situations (the drinking age, driving age, age of consent, military age) where a number has to be picked. It could be argued that there could be a merit-based solution where some system of merit could be used in substitute of a number so that it wouldn't have to be arbitrary, but that solution could be expensive, time-consuming, or hard to achieve. What would a merit-based test for being able to drink alcohol?

Take any of those issues and pick a number. Now that number could be just as defensible as other numbers so that it would be a reasonable choice or it could be less defensible. With the Smashed Avocado when I was thinking about it I thought that both 3-4 ingredients were the best solution. Both 2 and 5 were also reasonable choices and could have been chosen, but one seemed a little too simple and the other was starting to become too complicated, while the rest of the choices, 0 or anything above 5, looked awful. This is the same for the drinking age and military age where anywhere between 15-19 seems reasonable and each age beyond those numbers becomes increasingly hard to defend. 

 

This displays the arbitrary nature of making age-related choices, but it also alludes to the necessity of having restrictions on those choices. There are good reasons to want to exclude 8-year-olds from driving a car, or voting, reasons which, in general, slowly become invalidated as a person becomes older.


In the case of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado, there didn't seem to be any other way to create a definition based on history or consensus so it seemed to necessitate the arbitrary definition. The whole situation reminds me of a great quote from the movie Argo, "This is the best bad idea we have, sir.' [Side note, I swear there is a famous quote that is roughly equivalent to that quote but made by a famous politician, but I could not find it after about 30 minutes of searching...I would be very grateful for anyone who knows that quote I'm thinking about to add it as a comment.]


Setting an arbitrary number like this really also shifts the burden of proof back onto anyone who wants to criticize that choice, as through the act of picking an arbitrary number and making the argument that it is as good as any other number the situation has been created where someone then has to attempt to show why that number is worse than any other number or that the number isn't needed. Anytime an arbitrary number is picked it then has the benefit of not having to be better than any other choice, but simply not having to be worse.


With that, my next post, which I've already mostly completed, is about a situation where necessary arbitrary choices fail.

 Guacamole? Smashed Avocado?

             

I have been inspired to write off and on but haven’t really made the time for it in a while. I’m going to make more of an effort to write something once a week or so, especially when something worth writing about, that is also fun to write about pops out of the ether and into my mind. That is exactly what happened the other night with a friend when we started talking about Guacamole. We started talking about it, but soon the alternative of Smashed Avocado came up. He was talking about a very simple Guacamole, so I stated that I think that might just be a Smashed Avocado and not a Guacamole. We talked about this for entirely too long while another friend just wanted to eat and got increasingly hangry as each minute of the conversation ground by. 

The rest of this post will be a summation of what we thought about the definition of Guacamole vs Smashed Avocado and the conclusion that I came to the next day, with the added bonus that I’ll give my recipe for Guacamole! In no way is it possible to skip to the end and just get the recipe if that is what you wanted to do, you’ll have to buckle in, strap on something and read every word, possibly twice, and only then will it appear at the bottom. 

So, the topic of Guacamole is brought up and then I introduce the idea of Smashed Avocado. First, there was some disagreement that Smashed Avocado is a thing, but it was verified that it was a defined thing. After that, an important distinction was made that Smashed Avocado and Guacamole didn’t exist like a Venn Diagram where there was an overlapping definition. These circles were apart and each existed independent of the other! With both Smashed Avocado and Guacamole agreed to exist and exist independently from each other the question was then what separated the two?

My friend was confident in a Seinfeldian definition that Guacamole that ran along the lines of how Jerry defined Sex. 

Elaine:

 Hey, Jerry, when do you consider sex has taken place?

Jerry:

 I'd say when the nipple makes its first appearance.

In this case, 

Your Dashing Hero: 

Hey, Sweetness (that’s his real name), when is Smashed Avocado transformed into Guacamole?

Sweetness:

I’d say when the lime juice and salt makes its first appearance. 

This seemed too simple to me, why lime juice and salt? Did Sweetness as a child get lost in a patch of Cilantro, lose his favorite white sneaker in the depths of the leaves and escape with only a dirty foot and lifelong aversion to the plant? He did live on a farm, so I thought it was the possible answer, but he confirmed that he liked cilantro and wasn’t part of people who found it to taste like soap, possibly due to genetic variants in olfactory receptors (if it smells like soap it tastes like soap). Still, why no cilantro, cumin, chipotle, onion, or garlic? Why was it specifically lime juice and salt? The debate raged on while the third friend, a famished man, threatened to take someone’s life if we didn’t stop talking about food and instead went to get food.

 

The conversation ended for a while as lives were now at stake, but the topic reemerged when Sweetness’s order ended up coming with Guacamole on top of it or was that Smashed Avocado? We debated a little more again as the third party, Johnny Sunshine, now that he had food in front of him, was back to his beaming-self and lives were no longer at risk. Sweetness stuck to his guns and thought that it was lime juice and salt, but I couldn’t live with that definition and was very unhappy with it. 

The next day I wasn’t thinking about it but a conclusion as to the definition hit me that I was very satisfied with. The Alligator Pear from the Testicle Tree turns into Smashed Avocado when it is mushed up and then combined with more than two ingredients and whenever a third ingredient is added then you no longer have the simple ‘Smashed Avocado’; It is the complex Guacamole. This works because Smashed Avocado is defined by its simplicity and the prominence of the Avocado whereas Guacamole seems to imply that there has been enough added to it that it is no longer just a smashed Avocado, enough has been changed that it becomes a Guacamole. Lime juice and salt?! Not enough in my books!

What that the world has been made an intelligible place once again and so it is time to snack on some Guacamole, as it has more than 3 ingredients so it can be known that it is a Guacamole. 

The Moral Guacamole

4-5 - Ripe Avocados (If they aren’t ripe don’t bother! You want to be able to push your finger into them a bit and be able to mash them easily with a fork)

2 -Tablespoons of Lime Juice

1 – Chipotle in Adobo Pepper (2 if you like things a bit hotter as I do)

3 to 4 - Cloves of Garlic

1 – Tablespoon of Cumin 

1/2 Cup of Chopped Cilantro 

1/3 Cup of your Favorite BBQ Sauce (You want anything a little Sweet, Tangy and a bit Spicy)

Salt (to taste)

Directions:

1. Scoop out the Avocado into a bowl and mash it with a fork. Mashing with a fork gives a little bit of a textural difference and you want to stop before everything is evenly mashed so that there is the odd little chunk of Avocado. 
2. Chop the Garlic and Chipotle pepper up into very small pieces.
3. Combine all ingredients into the bowl and mix until well mixed. 

Give it a taste and feel free to add anything if you want more of it but that’s been pretty tried and true for me for several years. The Guacamole will be a little sweeter than you're used to with the BBQ sauce, but it should be balanced pretty well between the sweet and the hot while having a lot of flavors. 

*Bonus note - if you want to turn it into a Smashed Avocado recipe remove any 5 ingredients.