Blues Man
Diamond Member
- Aug 28, 2016
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Talk about micromanagementIts about Subway trying to claim a tax break that they are not entitled to.Subway is trying to be exempt from the VAT tax, they are making shit up saying it's not bread to much sugar in it.They are telling Subway that they can't label it as bread. Subway are changing the recipe because they have been caught lying to their customers.Tastes like cancer. But, it's still bread. A combination of flour, water, yeast, salt, and sugar.
Not in Ireland.
Maybe it's the government who's now lying to Subway's customers.
Okay, I read the link. Ireland imposes a VAT (surprise, surprise - a European country), and has defined bread as having sugar of 2% or less weight than flour, and now wants to start taxing Subway more heavily.
Seems like a sandwich maker would have a better definition for bread than a government would, but at any rate, I hope instead of paying the extra tax, they just change their menu to say "confectionery" instead of "bread."Its a cake not bread.Food needs to be labelled honestly so that the consumer can make informed choices. Big food fights that every step of the way.Who wants to live in a country where they place a "legal limit" on ingredients in any food?
Bread is nothing but water yeast flour and yes sugar and even butter or some kind of oil.
WHat does it matter if one person's recipe has a little more sugar?Cakes have a much higher fat content than breads and don't use yeast as a leavening agent.
Ultimately, it seems to get down to the same logic that was behind our own infamous Nix v. Hedden case here in the U.S., where our Supreme Court ruled that a tomato is not a fruit, based on the desire of government to tax and regulate it less favorably as a “vegetable” than as a fruit. As a matter of undeniable, objective, scientific fact, a tomato is, in fact, a fruit; and it was insane to allow or accept our high court, or any other part of government, to attempt to dictate otherwise. About like allowing government the authority to dictate that two plus two equals ten.
I just spent some minutes wandering through various Wikipedia articles, to get some idea of what is and is not bread. Nothing that I saw in any of them supports any idea that to qualify as “bread” a product must have less than any arbitrary amount of sugar in it. In fact, as far as what unquestionably constitutes bread, there is a much wider range of various types, distinguished by far more characteristics of far more significance, than how much sugar they contain. Things that clear;y constitute bread range from the sort of yeast-leavened bread under discussion here, to various forms of other grain-based preparations from various type of unleavened flatbreads, (of which the most familiar to us Americans are Mexican-type tortillas (not to be confused with Spanish tortillas, which are something totally different than what we associate with the word)), to products that are leavened by methods other than years, including chemical leavening (such as baking soda or baking powder) or even steam-leavened, such as popovers and yorkshire puddings.
Though none of my Wikiwandering really said o, it seems clear to me that such things as cookies and cakes and crackers are really forms of bread as well. Given the wide variety of things that clearly are bread, it seems impossible to come up with any rational basis for denying that cookies/crackers/cake qualify as bread.
In any case, various forms of bread have been made and consumed for nearly all of known human history, in nearly all cultures and societies, since long before anything recognizable as Ireland's present government or any prototype thereof existed. I have to say that it is factually incorrect for the Irish government to presume to dictate that something is not bread, that thousands of years of human history have already determined otherwise.
There seems to be some underlying premise that Ireland's government is doing this out of concern for the health of its people. To that, I have to call bullshit. Ireland's government is doing this as an excuse to fleece it's people in higher taxes, on a blatantly false premise—in other words, to engage in fraud. This is the sort of skulduggery for which any entity other than government would be criminally prosecuted, and sent to prison.
Basic staple food are exempt from tax so that poorer folk can afford the. Subways will be tax exempt whhen they reduce the sugar. They dont have to reduce the sugar at all. They can continue to make their rolls as they do now. But they will lose the tax break.
I guess things are pretty good over there if all they have to worry about is how many teaspoons of sugar are in a hero bun.
Or things are so bad the fucking government is inventing ways to squeeze every penny it can out of the public.
I tend to lean towards the latter