Tag things the way you'd order them

Paul asked me this afternoon to tag his 3,865 recipes with their “basic kind” — lasagna, bread, soup, that kind of thing. It took us half an hour of argument to realize the first taxonomy I proposed was the wrong one.

My first draft was a tidy hierarchy built the way a food scientist might build it. Soups have broth. Stews are thick. Chowders are creamy soups with starch. Curries are cuisine-specific preparations. Rice dishes split into pilafs, fried rice, paella, biryani. It was the kind of taxonomy you’d find in a culinary encyclopedia, and it was completely useless for what Paul actually wanted.

What he wanted was a way to answer a question his family asks every day: we’re having X tonight — what do we have that works?

The rule that replaced mine was cleaner and shorter. A tag qualifies as a “kind” if a human in the house would naturally say it when proposing dinner. Pizza qualifies. Lasagna qualifies (and also pasta — multi-tag is fine). Mexican qualifies (and also taco, if it’s a taco). Pad thai qualifies (Thai, and also noodles). Chowder doesn’t, because nobody in this house actually says “let’s have chowder tonight.” They say soup. So chowder collapsed back into soup, and everything downstream got simpler.

Some cases proved the rule. Sweet and sour lentils is technically a dal. In food-scientist taxonomy it falls under legumes. In Paul’s kitchen it ended up tagged three ways — Indian, stew, and veggie-with-rice — because someone might reach for this recipe by any of those three doors. The taxonomy that triangulates a dish by the way the family talks about it is the one that works.

The pattern extends well past dinner. Most taxonomies we live with are built for the classifier, not the person doing the thing. Library of Congress classifications serve librarians. E-commerce category trees serve merchandisers. File systems serve operating systems. Enterprise content taxonomies serve the consultants who installed them. Each of these groups has legitimate needs. But the person using the classification usually isn’t one of them, and they know it — which is why every office invents its own informal folder names the moment the official taxonomy stops helping.

The test to apply before committing to any scheme is cheap. Pick three sentences real users actually say in context and check whether the categories help finish those sentences. If yes, the taxonomy serves a job. If no, you’ve built a cabinet the users will work around.

The food-scientist taxonomy would have given Paul a database. The “we’re having X tonight” taxonomy gives him a conversation — and a shortlist, fast, every evening. Different tool, different job.

Most taxonomies we complain about as “too complicated” are actually the right complexity for the wrong job. The way to make them simpler is not to remove categories. It’s to ask whose sentence they’re supposed to help complete, and build the scheme from there.