Everything is a Superfood
If everything is a superfood, then nothing is.
Everything is a superfood. Don’t believe me? Google it.
Grapes are a superfood.
Fucking potatoes are a “nutrient rich superfood”.
Wheat. WHEAT! Wheat is a superfood.
Chicken is a superfood.
Pork is a superfood.
It can’t be everything
The supermarket ASDA offers at minimum 21 different fruits on their site:
Apples, pears, rhubarb, bananas, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, cherries, raspberries, oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, melon, pineapple, mango, kiwi, peaches, plums, nectarines.
Google tells me they are all a superfood. Maybe all fruits are?
On the veggie side, Asda also sell:
Potatoes, mushrooms, onions, leeks, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, sprouts, garlic, chillies, herbs, asparagus, sweetcorn, courgettes, aubergine, squash
All superfoods!
The same goes for all of the beans/legumes/whatever they sell, all the low/unprocessed meat they sell (basically everything that isn’t bacon is a superfood), all the fish they sell, and on it goes.
They are all superfoods.
Popcorn is a superfood!
What’s going on?
I have two ideas, and I suspect it’s a bit of both.
- LLMs are very easily poisoned when it comes to “low stakes” questions, and don’t care much for the authority of a source they trust. This dovetails nicely with there being a spam blog post about how “X is a superfood” for every foodstuff X. This is more like food poisoning (ha!) than anything else, because I don’t think it’s on purpose. Big-potato aren’t attacking Gemini.
- I don’t know what the word “superfood” means and I don’t like it. If everything is a superfood then nothing is. I don’t just eat 3 portions of food per day, I eat 3 portions of nutrient-dense superfood.