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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

Alright, time to be contrarian: so what.

Ok, it's interesting that the law in Ireland requires a 2% or less baker's weight of sugar. And I do enjoy a good sourdough, which isn't made with any sugar, or just a pinch.

But my favourite sandwich bread is Japanese milk bread, it's soft, lovely crumb, and it browns beautifully in the pan.

It's got a lot of sugar in it, that's the secret. A random recipe I found says 18% baker's weight, which seems accurate.

Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil? The glycemic index of white flour is dire, I doubt adding sugar is going to move the needle.

Sugar in dough makes it soft, with a giving crumb, and a crust which can be brown without becoming hard.

Exactly what you want in a sandwich filled with toppings, so that they don't shoot out the back when you bite into it.

Clutch your pearls all you want about 'Subway misrepresenting healthy food'! They publish the macros of their sandwiches. It's not nearly so healthy as eggs scrambled in butter, there's a ton of carbs and not nearly enough fat.

Unless you think it's the other way around that's healthy. It's your stomach, you get to pick.

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> Are we pretending that polysaccharides are the staff of life, but when you get down to disaccharides they become the Devil?

Devil or not devil is off topic: it's not about not-devil or devil, it's about the difference between bread and cake. Which isn't a value judgement at all. But that is a line that will unsurprisingly be drawn differently in different cultures.

The legal issue isn't putting too much sugar in a product, it's putting much sugar in there and then labeling that product in a way that is deceptive in the local language (and in this case a tax angle, but it could be a court issue even without that).

Very well constructed argument. Please see here that the court is preventing subway from claiming tax breaks by classifying their product as staple food (bread). They are not preventing people from eating it.

Ah yes, I did read the article, and even comment that the Irish tax angle is of some interest.

My riposte here is that the Irish definition of bread doesn't comport with many delicious baked goods I would be happy to call bread, and eat with cheese and some cold cuts. I'm glad you appreciated it.

This isn't that unusual; Germans refuse to call many tasty beverages 'beer', and I'm sure this suits the Irish just fine.

The point of the classification is to not unduly burden the poor by taxing staple foods, such as bread. It's not about being snobby, everybody can agree that on the outside of a subway sandwich there is bread. But subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more. I wouldn't really call it a staple.

My opinion is that this is a bad policy.

We could just tax it all equally (plenty of folks making good money eat at Subway) and ensure that the people have enough money to get by. But instead, governments around the world create these Rube Goldberg machines that require a court to define what bread is.

My reading is that rather the Subway franchisee tried to define what a "staple food" is, saying that Subway sandwiches are "staple food" because bread. The court decided that, no, they're not, because we have a legal definition of what "bread" means and the stuff in your sarnies is not that.

You wouldn't need legal definitions for obvious things like that if people didn't constantly try to wring every last drop of profit out of each other by twisting things this way and that. Them's the roots of the "Rude Goldberg" machines in your comment: people getting creative to make a pig's meal of perfectly sensible laws that are there for a reason other than help folks maximise their profits by selling hot bullshit on a stick.

In the Netherlands there are two levels of sales tax (BTW); the high one for "luxury" goods - 21%, and a low (9%) one for necessary stuff. A lot of goods are necessary, and there is no need for the country to profit from (after all, the sales tax goes to the government, not to the shop owner).

You can also use sales tax to nudge people into buying more healthy food. The fact that hamburgers and chips are cheaper than a salad and fruit is something you can correct somewhat by moving junk food to the higher sales tax.

And I personally also think that the judges might have taken into account that this seems like yet another multinational that wants a tax cut over the heads of the normal companies. The news that Mr President pays nickles and dimes as income tax where John Doe pays tenfold nicely paints the picture...

Why not both? Ensure people have enough money to get by and don't levy sales tax on staple foods. People value cheaper food over conceptual simplicity of the tax system.

Sure in a perfect world your comment makes sense.

But your comment essentially boils down to fix poverty. People have been trying to do that for a long time. Situation is improving in some places but we are still not even close to be there.

So until we fix poverty, workarounds like this provide real help to real people.

Just like software systems legal systems should probably get "refactored" once in a while. But just like managers don't really understand that need, politicians don't either.

Besides being unfair to both managers and politicians, that analogy doesn’t work. Refactoring by definition does not affect the visible behavior of a program. The judicial system is not a computer and cannot just happily start executing a newly refactored program. This is doubly so in common law jurisdictions that lean heavily on precedents and case law.

> subway is fast food. The ingredients are selected to make you buy and buy more.

Exactly. If you add enough salt, sugar, and fat you can make anything taste good, regardless of whether it's actually "food".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food...

A thing can be good and also not bread (or beer or whatever). You can even eat a thing with cheese and it may still not be bread – shocking, I know. Crackers are not bread. Coffee is good too and it’s not bread. It would be strange to insist that it should be considered bread on the basis that it’s a perfectly good food product. Or that it’s also made from a seed. Or any other arbitrary similarity it might have. The word “bread” still has a specific meaning.

Anytime you give something a legal definition, there’s no requirement that it has to resemble the common use of the word, and it often won’t. You can see the issue play out in the self-sustaining cycles of ever increasing complexity that you get with pretty much any regulatory framework.

Take the FIA’s technical regulations of F1 as a non-political example. They’re long and get longer every year, primarily because they have to address issues like having a mass damper mounted inside the chassis defined a “moving aerodynamic part”, but a giant fan on the back of the car not defined as a “moving aerodynamic part”.

I think it’s important for people to pay attention to, because when you hear somebody like a politician speaking, you might think that you know what all the words they’re saying mean, but there’s a good chance that you actually don’t.

Right. This is just one of those cases where people get confused about different definitions in different contexts.

This is about the "statutory definition of bread" for the purposes of being considered a "staple food" for tax purposes.

The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be. "Your bread's so sweet the Irish government doesn't consider it bread!" Which is a fun point that I wholeheartedly endorse, but it doesn't make any difference to what we call "bread" in everyday life.

> The only reason this is of any interest at all is because it makes fun of how sweet mass-market American bread tends to be

I just went and looked at the Irish Tesco’s website, and plenty of the sliced bread they’re selling exceeds 2% sugar by weight. So if you were an Irish voter and you once heard a politician say “I’m going to make bread 0% VAT”, you could have easily been fooled into thinking that included the bread you get in your grocery shopping, when perhaps it doesn’t.

To be fair, sliced bread (the square stuff that's used to make sarnies and toasties) should not be called bread. Never mind the legal definition. It's a mess of supplements and emulsifiers and stabilisers and whatever. Yet, you can make perfectly good, delicious bread with only flour and water (not even salt, let alone sugar).

Why are all that other stuff in sliced "bread", then? Probably because they improve shelf life or make the product resemble some ideal of "bread" that has been created by marketing teams and promoted by advertisements showing fake bread behaving in a certain way in different cooking conditions (oooh, look at how crisp those bread slices are as they pop out of the toaster!) (wait, why does your toaster have a strobing red light slit?).

In short, that sliced "bread" is not bread, it's a product that masquerades as bread for the purpose of being sold to people who want to buy actual bread. It's like a, a, a mimetic parasite that pretends to be one kind of animal when it is another so that it can more easily approach its host. It's like a cookoo egg that will hatch to a cookoo fledgling that will throw all other eggs outside the nest so it can hogg their parents' attention. It's like a synthetic hormone, or protein, that binds onto the receptors that are meant for the real thing and inhibits the real thing's action. It replaces true bread in the baskets and the bellies and the minds of people, until nobody buys true bread anymore becase it looks ...weird and not like what they're now used to call bread, and everybody buys that fake bread shit instead, that the fake bread makers prefer to sell over true bread, because it makes them more money.

Sure, that sort of stuff should not be allowed to be sold as bread in the first place. It should be forced to have big, red labels on its packaging stating clearly "THIS IS NOT REAL BREAD". When consumer goes to supermarket to buy bread, because they want to buy bread, they should be informed that what they are about to buy is not bread- then they can make their choice whether to buy it or not.

This is a pretty extreme stance. Supermarket bread is real bread, box cakes are real cakes, etc... Refining a recipe in a lab, to better meet some criteria doesn’t make something not bread. That’s a bit like saying Nikes aren’t real shoes because they weren’t made by a wise old Italian cobbler over a period of 3 months.

There’s fairly obvious qualitative difference between a handmade sourdough and a loaf of supermarket bread, but they’re both bread.

Also, it’s pretty easy to make a fantastic, lovingly crafted loaf of bread by hand that ends up having more than 2% sugar.

I think what's extreme is the amount of extraneous ingredients that are added to sliced "bread". These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product- they're only there to improve the ability of the product to return a profit.

In any case, let me be clear: I didn't say anything about Nikes not being true shoes. My comment is about fake bread. I also didn't say anything about who makes bread and for how long it's made. My comment is about ingredients added to fake bread that are not needed to make bread and are only needed to produce a product of inferior quality to true bread so that this product can be sold at a cut price and displace true bread in consumers' baskets etc.

> These recipes are not "refined" to meet any criteria that have to do with quality of the product

This comment is just ignorant of how modern food science works. All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product. They exist to improve the texture (try recreating that texture at home, you won’t be able to), to improve the moisture content, to improve the nutritional value (eg, all of the vitamins added to fortified flour), and to improve the shelf life.

You’re free to not like it, and it would be reasonable to say it’s not ‘traditional bread’. But traditional bread didn’t contain yeast monocultures either, so most breads won’t meet that standard. What you have is a very niche opinion, and it would be equally valid to say that adding extraneous ingredients like seeds or yeast makes something ‘fake bread’.

>> All of the ingredients in mass-produced bread exist to improve the quality of the product.

Nothing in mass-produced anything exists to improve quality. The economics of mass-production only work if quality is reduced with respect to small-scale production. Because when you mass-produce something, you want to sell it to as many people as possible. And in order to sell something to as many people as possible, you have to make it as cheap as possible, or most people won't buy it. But, to make something cheap you have to reduce its quality, because good quality costs a lot of money - and if you're mass-producing something you have real low margins because you're counting on selling as much of it as possible to make a profit, so you have to choose the cheapest ingredients. And so quality goes out the window.

>> They exist to improve the texture (try recreating that texture at home, you won’t be able to), to improve the moisture content, to improve the nutritional value (eg, all of the vitamins added to fortified flour), and to improve the shelf life.

I don't need to recreate the texture of fake bread. I can make my own bread and it has a great texture that is exactly like the texture of the bread I've eaten all of my life, straight from the baker's. I don't know why you need to improve the moisture content of bread either, the moisture content of real bread is just fine. As to fortifying bread with vitamins- why ever would I need that? I eat plenty of vegetables and fruit, as well as meat and pulses and so on and I don't need my diet supplemented with vitamins in bread, of all things. As to shelf life, the only reason that fake bread lasts longer is so that it can stay on the shelf longer and be sold for longer. I don't care about that, neither does anyone I know. Like I say it's only meant to maximise the seller's profit.

Like I say in my other comment, fake bread is fake and real bread is real and I'm afraid that the only reason we're having this conversation is because fake food is so common it's taken the place of real food and many people think it's normal. It isn't- it's overprocessed shit of the lowest possible quality.

Also, please note that I never said anything about seeds, or yeasts, etc, ingredients that are common in real bread.

I see we've narrowed your definition of "fake bread" down to "bread that's different from the bread I prefer to eat".

Also, just to point out a factual error. Most of the sliced bread in the supermarket is sold the same day it’s baked. The added shelf life is so that it lasts longer once you’ve taken it home.

I personally love to bake, but I don’t bake bread that often because I can’t eat a loaf of homemade bread before it goes stale.

>> I see we've narrowed your definition of "fake bread" down to "bread that's different from the bread I prefer to eat".

What an awful conversational style. I specifically said that sliced bread in particular is fake bread, not that the bread I don't like to eat is fake bread. You keep over-interpreting my comments and coming up with things I never said.

And what you say about fake bread being baked the day it is sold is wrong, or at least it is in my neck of the woords (the UK).

In germany, being allowed to call yourself "beer" has quite a few legal requirements. Imported beer is largely exempted on account of EU law if they don't write "brewed according to german purity law" on the bottle, but locally brewed beer must adhere to strict rules on what is permitted to be put into it.

Originally that essentially meant hops, wheat, water. Nowadays it may also include sugar, natural color enhancing, salt and simple preservatives.

Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.

> Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.

Honestly, this whole paragraph sounds incredibly ignorant from most any perspective. Most US generalizations have a certain amount of truth to them, but you seem to have picked the wrong ones. You have no idea what tasty beverages they were referring to, or that the US and many other countries have incredibly fast-growing craft brewery scenes, or that tap water isn't centrally managed across the US so poor water quality "in the US" is undefined.

I've been to the US and no matter the place I've been, the tap water is terrible compared to what I get from my own tap at home. Maybe this is different in some very rural and remote mountain regions in the US.

While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.

Tasty beverages for me as a german boil down to either a soda or beer. ANd granted, I've tasted the american versions of various sodas and softdrinks. Even our coca cola tastes better and less artificial.

> the tap water is terrible compared to what I get from my own tap at home.

I suspect this is just because it's not what you're used to rather than an actual quality judgment. I feel this about my home city when I travel elsewhere, and I complained about my current home city when I first moved here from a different country. For instance, I've felt the same about the water in many German cities whether I visited from Switzerland or the US.

> While the US has a fast growing craft brewery scene, the german one has about 800 years head start in experience and market depth.

I agree that this difference probably exists, but no one's starting from scratch these days and there's no reason to indicate it would continue at the same pace as Germany in the 1200s anyway, so I would presume it's far from a 800-year headstart (if there's any at all). In many cases, there may be no advantage besides the cultural recognition of certain concepts that have been more pervasive in Germany for a long time. Have you actually tried a decent variety of North American craft beers?

This is certainly a matter of taste. When I was in Germany for months, I had to buy bottled water to make tea, because what I got out of the tap was undrinkable.

Germans appear to love their mineralwasser. I find it tastes like soap. If that's what you like, then the stuff out of my tap will also be undrinkable.

No arguments about the soft drinks, though. I go out of my way to get the Coke with sugar rather than corn syrup -- I don't think I'm just fooling myself that I can taste the difference.

I remember Denver (or anyway Jefferson County) water as quite good. It is true that there are other regions where it's hard to say much good about the water.

Surely you meant barley.

I wasn't thinking of the many world-class microbrews in the USA, nor the proletarian pisswater either; most of them qualify as beer in Germany, that bitterness you're tasting comes from your palate, not the water.

Rather of lambics, which, being not much of a beer drinker myself, I prefer. The sweet ones are alright, but a dry cherry lambic, now, that's what I call a beer.

Barley isn't used much in my region, historically because while beer initially contained barley, the taxes were expensive so people lobbied for wheat. So nowadays, my region is largely wheat-based beers and barley isn't as common.

>Many "tasty beverages you would call beer in the US" barely qualify for a drink in germany, either because it tastes like water with a drop of beer or has almost no real taste at all (ie, tastes artificial with flavor). That's on top of the poor water quality in the US that contributes to a (IMO) chalky and flat base taste.

And this is why so many travelers to the US buy "imported" beers at bars without knowing that they've been tricked into overpaying for our mid-tier national brands.

I think this maybe boils down to how Ireland wants to tax sugar in general and has little to do with subjective definitions of what's a preferable foodstuff to them or those abroad.

Are you very much against calling them cake or any other way than bread?

I'd like to know if the thing that I'm going to buy will taste sweet or not and I treat, it having name 'bread', as a good indicator that it will taste rather salty than sweet.

If only the entire planet would fall under your whimsical notions of categorization, maybe we'd have semblance of delicious order. At least in your mind.

Excluding so many "tasty beverages" must be why German beer has such a terrible reputation.

Not to veer off on too much of a tangent, but I find Germany’s notoriety for beer odd. They’re main claim to fame is that that they have old beers... but you can find more diversity in locally brewed beers in 40 square city blocks in Portland (Ore.) than you can in all of Germany. I loved living in Germany, and love beer, but hype re Germany being exceptional for beer is just wrong and, I imagine, stems mostly from Oktoberfest and legend.

Edit: typo

Germany has great beers and many tiny “micro breweries” before that was even a trend, old and new. Germany just doesn’t do the style of craft beer that’s popular in the US. You won’t find “apricot IPAs” or whatever but there’s plenty of diversity in the different regions and styles of beer. I think the reputation is mostly justified especially in the south.

I don't think it's entirely true in the south either, there is plenty of breweries around here, though granted a lot of them sell their own brew + brew from a distributor to balance their sheets. Many small towns have their own brewery, even if it just services the local tavern/restaurants with local + brand brew.

There is about 25 local breweries in my area in germany. Half of them predate WW1, some are almost as old or even older than the United State of America. The town I was born in had a "micro brewery" run by monks since around the 1200s, the only reason they write "196x" is in part because it was destroyed during the thirty year war in the 17th century and then again during WW1 and WW2. The church never had much more than 20 people there and since atleast a hundred years the brewery is run by less than 3 people.

It’s certainly more varied than that.

The large industrial breweries and their products dominate the market and the majority of German beer drinkers probably don’t really care about (and likely couldn’t tell apart) the type or specific taste of their beer, as long as it’s beer.

However, the quality of German industrial beers is still very good. It’s just that they mostly taste the same, especially those of the Pilsner variety.

Nevertheless, even though they don’t dominate the market there’s a flourishing, often centuries old, tradition of highly diverse, local brews and plenty of different types of beers.

In the last decade or so, mostly due to the craft beer trend in the US and the UK, there’s also been a growing number of modern craft beer and micro breweries.

The main claim is not that our beer is old. The main claim is that the ingredients adhere to a strict standard: Hops, malt, yeast and water, nothing else is allowed. So there are still thousand ways to brew a beer, and as another commenter said, there are so many breweries in my vicinity I can't even count them.

But German beer having a bad reputation in the world? Which part of the world would that be? Really curious.

Yes, you have a thousand beers of high quality, within a narrow band of the beer spectrum.

Belgium, next door, has a couple thousand more, also of high quality, across a much wider field.

Honestly an unfair competition, but it's how Germans like it, I suppose.

What do you think about the argument that in wine there is just one ingredient, still no real wine connoisseur would claim that there is narrow spectrum of wines. Same for beer, there are countless varieties of hops, malts and yeasts and by combining them and using different temperatures, brew durations and a multitude of other parameters you could still achieve a wide variety of different flavours that one could probably never try all of them in a lifetime.

I my view the "Reinheitsgebot" as it is called is just a way to ensure that this is a basic product where everybody knows what's inside, so more of a quality standard than a taste standard.

Sugar isn't just a glucose disacharide, its got fructose, which is functionally not a carb. It can only be metabolized in the liver, and in large enough quantities your liver is forced to metabolize fructose into fat, which taken far enough leads non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Glucose won't do that to you.

Fructose is definitely a carb. It's not a direct reactant in Kreb's cycle, but there are plenty of ways to move fructose through the metabolic pathways so the oxidation of those carbons results in the production of ATP.

Also, I wouldn't use "It can only be metabolized by the liver" as evidence of fructose's carbohydrate status: a) that has nothing to do with the definitions, and the statement is true for a very large number of molecules.

Emphasis on my wording, functionally not a carb. Its not treated how carbs normally are.

Could you elaborate? I'm reading this on wikipedia:

> Under one percent of ingested fructose is directly converted to plasma triglyceride.[2] 29% - 54% of fructose is converted in liver to glucose, and about a quarter of fructose is converted to lactate. 15% - 18% is converted to glycogen.[3] Glucose and lactate are then used normally as energy to fuel cells all over the body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructolysis

I can't find my source[1], but the amount of fructose converted to glucose is highly dose dependent. Over 30 grams (if i remember correctly) it basically all gets shunted to fat.

edit: [1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joim.12993

Yes, I'll grant you that fructose and glucose aren't bio-identical foods. A human can only absorb about 30 grams of fructose in an hour, and it looks like if we get well north of 120 grams in a day, bad things can happen.

That's sixty grams of sugar, or about 55 of high fructose corn syrup. Can't be more than 200 grams of flour in a twelve-inch subway, so twenty grams of sugar?

You'll be fine. Just, maybe don't get that fountain drink to go with it...

> human can only absorb about 30 grams of fructose in an hour

Absorb or metabolize?

I'd be interested in seeing any references for what you're talking about. I've heard before that fructose can lead to problems in excess, so it would be great to know some quantative guidelines for safe consumption.

I can't speak to the site in general, but this article is broadly in keeping with my own understanding:

https://www.climbingnutrition.com/diet/fructose/

There are some references as links, would be nice to find something drier with a thicket of refs at the bottom.

As usual, Le Wik delivers, though I'd enjoy seeing this section expanded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Fructose_digestion_an...

Very baffled second language speaker here. Terminologies regarding nutrients confuse me to no end.

Isn't carb an abbreviation of carbohydrate, which in turn is a synonym of saccharide?

How come fructose is a monosaccharide but not functionally a "carb"?

Not OP, but I think by "(not) functionally a carb" OP means "(not) processed as carb by your body".

Functionally => how it functions, how it interacts with something else, c.f. "functional testing" :) Unsure if this is nutritional terminology or just HN-reader terminology.

That make sense, thanks!

Because your body processes fructose through a different potentially more damaging pathway than glucose. It’s a carb if you like but it’s the worst carb for you by a huge margin, especially when eaten without fibre.

industrial sugar is a cheap filler. it is the rightful role of government to regulate the externalities imposed on consumers by producers that use asymmetries of information to sell adulterated staple foods like "bread" with a large amount of corn syrup in it. it is now necessary for buyers to spend a considerable amount of time and intellectual energy to avoid such things, and that imposes a real cost on consumers. if i want to know whether my food has added sugar, i now have to read the labels of every atomic "ingredient" that i buy, like canned tomatoes, or corn.

i only trade with subway because it is the closest thing to food i can buy at the airport or by the freeway. without consumer access to complete information, i doubt that i will have access to products that are not adulterated with cheap, harmful ingredients.

this seems to me like a canonical example of the sort of case where regulation would make a more efficient market.

Just because it has bread in its name does not mean anything. Or you consider shortbread a bread? Certainly the Irish won't. Pleased stop taking things literally.

> It's your stomach, you get to pick.

That's missing the point, Ireland isn't banning subways. You are still free to go and eat there.

The point is to have some common labels that define what a substance is, and some minimum quality control.

If I go and buy milk I would hope it comes from a cow, and isn't just water with artificial coloring.