It seems bread is considered a staple food and, among other staple foods, is granted VAT exempt status. Somehow the franchise of Subway in some town in Ireland wanted to take advantage of that and get the VAT-free status, but it was brought before the courts.
The panel of Supreme Court justices decided that this specific roll under debate is too sweet to be considered bread. This heated sandwich roll has too much sugar in it.
source: Independent.ie
True colors? It seems the justices deciding this case must have been Sephardic that consider sweetened bread to not be Hamotzi.
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Many Ashkenazim consider flavored bread to be cake. Including extremist and mainstream chassidim. It's only yeshivish that oppose. SA clearly implies it, and SA haRav specifically says flavored bread.
ReplyDeleteThis comes up in courts every now and then. There was a case in Massachusetts a few years back in which a sandwich shop had a deal with the mall it was in that they wouldn't rent to any other sandwich shop. When a burrito store opened, they tried to shut it down, but the court ruled that burritos aren't sandwiches, since the definition of "sandwich" is "two pieces of bread."
ReplyDeleteThere was a famous case in the US more than a hundred years ago: Vegetable imports had a tariff but fruit imports did not. So an importer argued that tomatoes are botanically fruit and should be exempt. The Supreme Court ruled that everyone considers a tomato a vegetable, so it is.
Interestingly, that matches halakha- we say HaAdamah on tomatoes. On the other hand, when it comes to bananas, we *do* follow the botanical definition and say HaAdamah as well.