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It's a delicious structure consisting of a small sponge with a chocolate cap covering a veneer of orange jelly. It is arguably Britain's greatest invention after the steam engine and the light bulb. But is a Jaffa Cake actually a biscuit, asks David Edmonds.
This question reheats a confectionery conundrum first raised in 1991. A tax is charged on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on cakes. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorised them as cakes and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorised as biscuits.
A legal case was fought in front of a brilliant adjudicator, Mr D C Potter. For McVities, this produced a sweet result. The Jaffa Cake has both cake-like qualities and biscuit-like qualities, but Mr Potter's verdict was that, on balance, a Jaffa Cake is a cake.
[...] We are tempted to think that every concept must have a strict definition to be useable. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them. Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game". Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common.
And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category.
Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics. It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world.
The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language ("All triangles have three sides"), and those that make a claim about the empirical world ("It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute") - is a longstanding one in philosophy. But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot.
What say you, soylentils? Is it a cake or a biscuit? Is it both or neither?
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38985820
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:44PM
It's quite obviously a cake, as anyone who's left a jaffa cake out too long will know.
So whats a twinkie? They don't change. Too many weird tropical oils to get hard (which sounds vaguely obscene) and nothing hygroscopic like molasses to go soft.
Note to our UK brethern, cousins separated by a shared language, a twink is different than a twinkie on this side of the pond. I do not believe either are sold in jolly ole england. Do you UK people like it when us ameri-burgers call you jolly ole england? If not, its not our fault, we learned everything we know about you brits from watching Mary Poppins movie when we were kids and soccer riots when we got older.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:10PM
Twinkies are neither: they are just delicious, delicious poison. :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:03PM
Note to our UK brethern, cousins separated by a shared language, a twink is different than a twinkie on this side of the pond. I do not believe either are sold in jolly ole england. Do you UK people like it when us ameri-burgers call you jolly ole england? If not, its not our fault, we learned everything we know about you brits from watching Mary Poppins movie when we were kids and soccer riots when we got older.
Actually, both twinks [may be NSFW] [google.com] and Twinkies [mysupermarket.co.uk] are sold in the UK.
Just sayin'.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:18PM
My apologies, oddly enough that was not covered in the Mary Poppins movie.
I suppose I'm old. "Kids these days", Ameri-burgers anyway, probably learn everything about the UK from "Harry Potter" movies and books and that fat kid probably ate a lot of twinkies.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NewNic on Wednesday February 22 2017, @07:24PM
Not a food.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday February 22 2017, @09:39PM
Concentrated Evil.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:23PM
So whats a twinkie?
Imagine Milo Yiannopoulos, but 15 years younger. Or the sorts he likes, but 10 years older.