h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am apologise for the lack of provision of battered macaroni cheese pies....

Does this mean that all Dave Camerons kitchen supper guest have to pay VAT on their £200,000 donations

>Pickled eggs are REALLY easy to make.<

Especially if you are a pickled chicken

Bum. I thought I'd found a crafty loophole. I thought maybe vendors of pies and pasties could make a 'courtesy microwave' available. However...

'4.6 What happens if I provide a microwave oven for my customers to use?

If you sell food to be taken away for consumption elsewhere, but you make a microwave oven available for your customers to heat up the food, either before or after the till point, you are making a supply of hot food which must be standard-rated. This is the case whether or not you make a charge for the use of the oven.'

Evil genius!

Good thing too, I guess. Microwaved pies and pasties are dreadful. Ditto samosas.

>unless it's caviar or something unnecessary.<



Since when is caviar unnecessary!!!!????


I couldn't live without it...


You'll be telling my my Dom Perignon supply is a luxury next

Apparently one should only eat caviar with a spoon made of horn.

Christ knows why I know that.

Whose horn?

Not 2legs I hope.

I tell a lie. Mother of pearl is also acceptable.

>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caviar_spoon

And now I have *another* useless piece of information cluttering up my head and preventing me from remembering where I put the car keys.

2legs horn is a renowned aphrodisiac.

I think the caviar + horn thing probably means that caviar reacts in some way with metal. In that case, plastic should be OK as well.

I remember Mrs G discovering that you shouldn't eat yoghurt with a silver spoon, whereas stainless steel is OK.

The British Royal Family has a set of gold plates, but they're useless because the food gets cold really quickly, so they never use them.

Yes, indeed. The metal taints the wee eggs. Seemingly.

I mis-parsed the last sentence initially. It wasn't the plates I thought were useless. That's what bias does do you.

Well if chocolate has VAT on it why not pasties?

I just hate the sneakiness of it all..It's just a fat tax.

What would be wrong with taxing unhealthy food? and not taxing healthy food?

Ah, Ed, you spotted my deliberate ambiguity there.

Well it would be called 'social engineering' and apparently that's a bad thing. In much the same way that the best way to build a bridge is to cobble it together with whatever bits of steel you have lying around, with society you're best leaving things to The Markets.

The issue here, as I understand it, is rationalising shop-bought hot food with restaurant/takeaway. Let's assume that there is something to be resolved - why should the corporate might of Greggs or the West Cornwall Pasty Company be taxed differently to a family run chippie?

How would you solve it?

What is unhealthy food? How is it defined?

If I eat 4000 kcals worth of bran flakes a day I'm sure that wouldn't be too good for me.

However if I eat 40 kcals worth of a Big Mac I'm pretty sure that would win on a an overall balanced diet type analysis.

They were telling us on the One Show a couple of years back, just how good lard is for us since it's got lots of dissolved fat soluble vitamins - unlike margarine.


A real that one

VAT on pasteys? Over my pastry encrusted body like I predict a riot...

No point, 2legs. There's no petrol to put in the bottles.

"What would be wrong with taxing unhealthy food? and not taxing healthy food?" [Z]

Context is pretty important here. If you eat a healthy, balanced diet 95% of the time, you will probably not be harmed by the deep-fried Mars bars or double cheeseburgers you eat the remaining 5%. The store or restaurant where you buy the "unhealthy" foods has no way of knowing what you eat the rest of the time. Even my doctor has said things to this effect.

Is there such a thing as an ecologically sustainable Molotov cocktail? Using vegetable oil recycled from deep fat fryers.