Content-Type: text/shitpost

The coffee shop near my house has started selling soup. Today they had “classic black bean’, which they claimed was “vegan and spicy!”, and “roasted pepper with smoked gouda”, described as “the opposite of vegan and very hearty”.

I take issue with this. It is not what “opposite” means. I thought I had discussed this before, but it seems that my article about it has been unfinished and unpublished since 2007. Here's a relevant excerpt:

This reminds me a bit of the time, about fifteen or twenty years ago, when I realized that "opposite of" is not at all the same as logical negation. For example, the opposite of "never" is "always". But the logical negation of "never" is "not never", or "sometimes". The opposite of "hot" is "cold", but the negation is "not hot", which is not at all the same as "cold".

I don't know why I found this so surprising, since "opposite" extends to all sorts of situations in which logic doesn't apply. Red is the opposite of green, but I'm not sure that it makes sense to ask for the logical negation of green. I suppose you can go with "not green", which is certainly quite different from "red".

The claim here is that roasted pepper with smoked gouda soup is the opposite of vegan. I agree that it is not vegan soup, but is this really sufficient for it to be the opposite of vegan soup? I think not. Wouldn't the opposite of vegan soup be something more like, I don't know, dinuguan, which Wikipedia describes as

a Filipino savory stew of pork offal (typically lungs, kidneys, intestines, ears, heart and snout) and/or meat simmered in a rich, spicy dark gravy of pig blood, garlic, chili (most often siling mahaba), and vinegar.

I didn't want to hassle the hapless coffee shop people, so you folks get to hear about it instead.

Also, there is a picture of what appears to be a green bell pepper giving me the finger. I don't even know what that is supposed to be about.