“Food is too salty” – Watch your mouth or get jailed

food, food bloggers, news, reviews | July 2, 2011 | By


Easy there with your adjectives, food bloggers. If you dare to call a restaurant’s offerings "too salty" in Taiwan (….), you could wind up behind bars, the Daily What notes.

A woman with an amateur food blog of moderate success (the Taipei Times reports she has received more than 60,000 hits) was sentenced to 30 days in jail, given two years probation and fined the equivalent of $6,782 CDN.

Source

I know, I know, different countries have different laws and expectations. People are jailed for all sorts of things we’d consider “silly.”

Here’s the kicker, though. The rest of her review said things about the restaurant having roaches and such, but the judge had no issue with that.  Apparently it’s okay to make claims about a place being unsanitary (even though it was later inspected and found at that point to be clean) and even to call the owner a bully (for letting customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams).

To call the food “too salty,” though, was considered defamation because the woman had only tasted one dish and therefore, shouldn’t speak about the restaurant’s dishes as a whole. The fine was to pay the owner for lost business. Oops.

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