{"id":2421,"date":"2009-06-22T11:16:37","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T18:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/06\/22\/the-principle-of-non-overlapping-food-groups\/"},"modified":"2009-06-22T11:16:37","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T18:16:37","slug":"the-principle-of-non-overlapping-food-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/22\/the-principle-of-non-overlapping-food-groups\/","title":{"rendered":"The Principle of Non-Overlapping Food Groups"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine, who is severely allergic to pork products, recently asked whether it would be okay for him to order a Western Omelet (ingredients:  eggs, cheese, ham, onions, peppers).  Superficially, this might seem like a fairly easy question:  the incompatibilities between Western omelets and pork allergies seem pretty obvious.  But I was able to use a sophisticated philosophical argument to convince him that everything would be okay.<\/p>\n<p>My inspiration was Stephen Jay Gould&#8217;s concept of <a href=\"http:\/\/metamagician3000.blogspot.com\/2009\/06\/noma-no-more-great-accommodationism.html\">NOMA<\/a>, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria.  This principle establishes the fundamental compatibility of science with religion, arguing that the two simply don&#8217;t address similar questions, and therefore cannot come into conflict.  Science deals with the workings of the world (&#8220;is&#8221; questions), while religion deals with ethical behavior (&#8220;ought&#8221; questions), so there is way they can be incompatible.<\/p>\n<p>In this spirit, I have developed what I like to call the principle of Non-Overlapping Food Groups, or NOFOG for short.  The basic argument is as follows:  throughout history, humans have divided our culinary products into a set of grand groupings.  Among these are the Egg Group and the Pork Group.  Clearly these are non-overlapping:  eggs come from chickens, while pork comes from pigs.  Q.E.D.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I don&#8217;t know about you, but a Western Omelet falls squarely within the Egg Group where I am from.  Growing up in our small house in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I would look forward to eggs every Sunday morning, most often in the form of a yummy Western Omelet.   While the identification is not perfect, we won&#8217;t go far wrong by recognizing the Western Omelet as a crucial component of the Egg Group on which we all depend.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly, since the Egg Group is non-overlapping with the Pork Group, and my friend&#8217;s allergies are only to pork, the NOFOG principle justified encouraging his interest in ordering the omelet.  I&#8217;ll be visiting him in the hospital tomorrow, hopefully he&#8217;s feeling better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend of mine, who is severely allergic to pork products, recently asked whether it would be okay for him to order a Western Omelet (ingredients: eggs, cheese, ham, onions, peppers). Superficially, this might seem like a fairly easy question: the incompatibilities between Western omelets and pork allergies seem pretty obvious. But I was able [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}