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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'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.
Edit: typo
But German beer having a bad reputation in the world? Which part of the world would that be? Really curious.
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.
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.
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.