On the desk of Keele University a lighthearted but surprisingly pointed paper proposes a single, sweeping idea: everything in the universe can be sorted into three buckets meat, vegetable and soup. The authors say they have built the most ambitious classification scheme yet, one that could cover both the planet and the cosmos, if you let it. The project comes from the MEATVEGSOUP Collaboration at Arbitrary Classification Research Group, Keele University, and is led by George Weaver and Matthew J. Selfridge. It reads like a napkin sketch that wandered into a lab notebook and kept walking, a playful dare to look at how we name things when the stakes feel existential.
The punchline is simple and sly: meat means a thing that grows exclusively in or from an animal; vegetable means a thing that grows exclusively in the ground; soup means a thing that contains both vegetable and meat. The trio is presented as a flowchart that guides decisions, a whimsical compass for a universe that stubbornly refuses to stay neatly categorized. The authors even joke about a weekend’s typing pretending to tape together a grand taxonomy that could someday catalog everything known and unknown. This is not a manifesto for scientific rigor so much as a cognitive experiment about how we decide what something is, and why those decisions matter.
What follows is not a lecture on biology or philosophy in the usual sense, but a friendly nudge toward humility in classification. If you take the three labels seriously, you can trap yourself in a neat little world where grass is vegetable, rhinoceroses are meat, and a chocolate cake is soup because it contains ingredients that count as both meat and vegetable in the schema. If you take them lightly, you see a delightful map that reveals how flexible our own thinking becomes when we push definitions to their limits. In that sense the paper is less about cataloging the world and more about exposing the human act of cataloging itself, including the quirks, blind spots, and poetry hidden in any taxonomy. The work behind the idea comes from Keele University, authored by a team led by George Weaver and Matthew J. Selfridge, with collaborators spanning the MEATVEGSOUP ensemble.
Three labels are not a sea of precision; they are a stage for conversation. The researchers acknowledge that the scheme is deliberately playful, a provocation that invites readers to question what counts as growth, what qualifies as a thing, and when a boundary between categories stops being meaningful. The tone is playful, but the question underneath is genuine: if we insist on universal schemes, what are we really asking the universe to do for us, and what might we lose in translation when we shoehorn complexity into neat buckets?
In other words, this is taxonomic theater with a wink. It is also a reminder that science too often borrows its most powerful tools—clear definitions, repeatable methods, and shared language—from playful experiments that begin as jokes. The Keele team does not pretend to dethrone biology or erase centuries of nuance; they are offering a parable about how we think about order itself. The result is a piece that reads like a science satire with a conscience: funny enough to charm a curious reader, serious enough to spark reflection on how we classify everything from bread to black holes. The authors note that their ultimate goal is not to win a Nobel Prize for taxonomy but to invite everyone to think more clearly about the words we use to describe reality.
The Simple Rules Behind It All
The core of the scheme rests on three labels that are meant to be exhaustive yet easy to apply. Vegetable means a thing that grows exclusively in the ground. Meat means a thing that grows exclusively in or from an animal. Soup means a thing that contains or is made from a mixture of both vegetable and meat. The trio is presented as a flowchart that guides decisions, a playful simplification of the messy world we live in. The diagram, described with a straight face, is the kind of tool that begs you to follow it, even while it begs you to notice its own absurdity.
The authors push back against venerable categories that cling to everyday life. They argue that old habits—food, plant, animal, or even non edible versus edible—aren’t universal laws but human conventions that deserve occasional debate. This is a reminder that taxonomy is a human pursuit, never a perfect mirror of everything that exists. The piece treats classification as a creative act, a way we wrestle with vast complexity by stitching it into a story we can tell and re tell.
Several examples punctuate the humor and the thought experiment. Grass, they note, grows in the ground and so merits the vegetable label. A rhinoceros, emerging from an animal, earns the meat label. And a chocolate cake, built from ingredients that include elements counted as both vegetation and animal products, earns the soup label. The jokes land because they reveal a key truth: strict categories always bend at the edges, and when we push, we discover the edges were never as solid as they appeared. The exercise asks not for perfect accuracy but for a lens on how we decide what counts as a thing.
As the discussion evolves, the paper contrasts old school taxonomy with what the authors call Arbitrary Classification. The aim is not to erase the past but to spotlight how easy it is to reframe a question until the answer looks different enough to matter. The tone is earnest enough to be persuasive, and cheeky enough to keep you reading. The authors do not pretend to have solved the problem of naming everything; they pretend to have revealed why naming everything is such a human, evolving endeavor.
The Surprising Corner Cases
If you start with three buckets and a cheerful rulebook, you should expect the trick to be in the exceptions. The paper delivers a handful of corner cases that feel like puzzles you might encounter at a museum cafe where the display placards got delightfully irreverent. One of the earliest shocks is water. The authors joke that water, in the earth’s water cycle, is vegetable because it grows in the ground. The reasoning is playful—chains of reasoning can twist logic when you redefine what counts as growth—yet it lands as a point about how flexible definitions become once you loosen the leash on terms. It is not a claim about chemistry or hydrology so much as a gentle reminder that categories depend as much on framing as on facts.
Another twist revolves around ground itself. The authors propose a bold move: the Big Bang created ground, ground gathered mass, and from there stems a cascade of relationships that lead to the planetary system we know. In their view, the sun and the planets are vegetable in a notional sense because they are grounded in space, and so the entire cosmos becomes a kind of vegetable until life or complexity adds a different texture. This is part of the Great Soupification arc, a playful way to mark how the universe shifts from a one color vegetable to a richer, more mixed state.
The universe is described as soup for large swaths of its history, with the caveat that the state can flip when life and diversity appear. The oceans, for example, are vegetable by virtue of their basic chemistry and state, but the oceans as a whole—teeming with creatures and processes—become soup once complexity arrives. The Great Soupification is placed at a notional moment in deep time, a wink toward the moment when life first folded into the fabric of the cosmos. The whole argument is less about clockwork science and more about whether our labels are robust enough to survive a philosophical road trip through time and space.
The paper does not shy away from the friction this generates. If you push the categories far enough, you reach contradictions that resemble the kind of debates you hear around a kitchen table after a long dinner. Why should a planet be vegetable, or is soup a stage that only appears after a certain level of complexity? The humor here is propulsion: it makes you pause, smile, and then ask what a good taxonomy should and should not pretend to do.
Beyond the cosmos and the kitchen, the authors sprinkle in more playful examples to show how flexible the scheme can be. In their universe of jokes, even intangible things surface—numbers, fears, money—counted as meat because they are formed in the human brain and thus have a biological origin in how we think. The joke sharpens a serious point: our language and our labels do real cognitive work, shaping how we understand what exists and what matters.
Changes of State
The model introduces a looped category language that maps transformations as transformations of state. The verbs are soupification, vegification, and meatification. Digesting a meal, for instance, is recast as a process where vegetable ingredients become meat as nutrients are assembled inside an animal. After death, the body decays and returns to the ground, and in a sense becomes vegetable once again. It reads like a biology class rewritten as a fairy tale, with the biology still there but the framing turned into a narrative device about growth, decline, and renewal.
This section also toys with the idea that concepts themselves are meat. Numbers, fears, money, and even ideas are said to be grown in the brain, and therefore part of this meat category. It is a cheeky claim about cognition, but it lands with a bite because it makes you think about the boundary between mental constructs and material reality. If a thought can be said to grow in a brain, does it then become a kind of meat that other minds must contend with when they relate to it? The joke gently pushes you to inspect where your beliefs live and how they acquire form.
The authors acknowledge that all categorization schemes are themselves meat within this self referential loop. The Meat Vegetable Soup framework ends up as a product of human cognition, a reminder that even the most ambitious taxonomy is a human artifact. The meta twist is the soft punchline: the more you try to capture everything with a simple scheme, the more you reveal about how thinking itself works. The joke is that our own boundaries keep getting re drawn, which is not a failure but a feature of intelligent curiosity.
In the end the section lingers on a provocative idea: classification is never neutral. It embodies values, assumptions, and cultural questions. When you classify the world, you decide what deserves attention, what gets erased, and how complex you permit your explanations to become. The playful frame helps us see the stakes without becoming grim about the act of thinking.
Future Work
The authors dream out loud about a Table of Everything, a grand catalog that would list all things in the universe and classify them correctly according to meat, vegetable, and soup. They estimate a ten year horizon and candidly admit that funding will be essential. The ambition is noble in its audacity, yet the tone remains light enough to keep it from tipping into dogma. The point is less the deliverable and more the invitation to imagine a framework capable of absorbing the unknown with a sense of humor and humility.
A machine learning classification tool is named as a next step, though the text concedes it may not add much functional value once the table exists. The joke lands as a meta commentary on the contemporary fixation with AI and automation: sometimes the thrill of a model is less about utility and more about how it reframes questions. The authors are clear that they are not declaring a new computational miracle, just playing with the idea that a robust classification system can shape conversations and expectations about knowledge itself.
The team also considers parallel or alternate universes, pondering whether there could be meat stars in other realities or soup life that outpaces ours in complexity. This thought experiment becomes a gentle reminder that our own taxonomies are always anchored to our experiences and the data we can access. If the universe does not resemble our expectations, what then should a universal classification look like? The playful tone invites readers to enjoy the speculative ride while recognizing the limits of any single scheme.
What this section leaves you with is a sense that science, at its best, embraces both rigor and imagination. The future work is less a binding contract than an invitation to keep testing the boundaries of how we describe reality. If a weekend of typing can spawn a framework for thinking about everything, the real payoff may be a more careful, creative approach to how we label and understand the world around us.
Results and The Table of Everything
As promised, the paper teases a Table of Everything, a mythical catalog where items appear under meat, vegetable or soup with zesty footnotes. In the spirit of a playful atlas, Table 1 in the document runs a parade of objects such as The Sun labeled vegetable, Earth designated soup, and the Universe described as soup except during moments of Great Soupification. The joke continues with items that resemble a prank in a classroom: The Moon as vegetable, ships and crowds labeled with context dependent notes, and even hypothetical items like passing mentions of CGI altered creatures. The point is not literal accuracy but a creative demonstration of how far a simple three bucket scheme can be stretched while still inviting conversation about what we mean by classification.
Readers are reminded that the concluding flourishes are precisely that—flourishes. The authors cap the piece with a sly nod toward Nobel Prizes for physics, literature, and peace imagined for a taxonomy that sweeps across knowledge and imagination alike. The humor is a reminder that science thrives best when tempered by play, because play reveals blind spots and invites thinking that would never arise in a dry taxonomy alone. The Table of Everything, if ever fully realized, would be a monument to curiosity, not a definitive map.
Where does that leave us, the curious readers? The central lesson remains potent: classification is a human tool, and the way we name, group, and order things shapes what we notice, what we value, and what we miss. The three bucket scheme—meat, vegetable, soup—offers a playful mirror for our own tendencies: to oversimplify, to take shortcuts, to treat definitions as unchangeable truths. The joke becomes a gentle invitation to examine our own taxonomies with curiosity and humor, to test their edges, and to welcome the surprising complexity that lies beyond neat labels. In that sense the paper achieves what it set out to do: it makes you think harder about how you think, and it does so with a smile.
