Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world

and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. So, earth-shaking news this week coming to us out of Ireland.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Irish Supreme Court's ruling that Subway, the sandwich

fast food chain, can't claim that their bread is actually, well, bread.

First off, what I wouldn't give to live in a country where these are the decisions that are coming

before the Supreme Court. How very wholesome at all seems. But yeah, apparently in Ireland there

are rules about what constitutes bread. According to NPR, the Irish

Value Added Tax Act of 1972 says, in order to be officially considered bread, your bread can't

have sugar, fat, and bread improver exceed 2% of the weight of flour. Bread Improver. We'll come back to that. In his book,

in defense of food, Michael Pollan takes us on a journey into bread. You see, bread used to be one of

those things that was extremely simple. Flower, water, yeast, and perhaps a pinch of salt. Then, of course, we decided that bread should be essentialized,

stripped of all that messy, husky, fibrous wondrousness, in favor of bread that was uniformly white,

soft, and pillowy. No gritty texture to it, and of course, very sweet. Just take bread out of its

former context. What could go

wrong? Only problem was, bread lost all its nutritional value. It became basically fluffy cardboard.

So then we had to inject a whole bunch of stuff back into it to make it nutritious again.

Amulsifiers, lecithin's, guar gum, something named azotacarbonamide, ethoxulated monoglycerides,

high fructose corn syrup.

So, yeah, the extraction of the perceived essence of things and the destruction of context in the

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