Lady Lunchalot

In the late 90s, Australia’s politicians were in hot debate about how to introduce a tax on goods and services. One party wanted to slap a single tax on everything, including food, the other didn’t think we should have one at all, especially not on food.

They ended up meeting somewhere in the middle,with some foods being exempt, while otherwise weren’t.

For weeks Australia’s Parliament House was a hotbed of culinary contention as pollie after pollie ferociously argued about which foods should be taxed and which shouldn’t. Parliamentarians were waving barbecued chickens and paninis around all over the place.

So there were some staples that would be exempt from the tax, but, which would would they be? Bread was declared a basic necessity of life, but how were these political gourmets going to classify what was a bread and what wasn’t? Should a chapatti be taxed when a loaf of multi-grain isn’t? Is a bagel any less a bread than a hamburger bun?

With so much food available to us today, I like that the humble loaf of bread is still considered crucial to our survival. Our language is littered with expressions that highlight the starring role bread has played in our evolution. Man cannot live by bread alone. When we have no money we are out of dough. We go to work to earn our bread and butter. Pregnant women have a bun in the oven. Handy inventions are the best things since sliced bread. When we dine, we are breaking bread. The primary income-earner in a family is the breadwinner.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Half-Baked Food Thoughts . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.