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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 is

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.

antonvs 6y ago
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.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  > 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.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
    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.
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      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.

antonvs 6y ago

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.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
> 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  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.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    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.