How Much Sauce Is Too Much Sauce?

I need the legalistic hive-mind of the internet to solve a complex moral question about side-orders and criminal intent

I’m taking a quick hiatus from my usual article about what’s wrong with society to talk about what’s wrong with my thought process. Ever since I was a young penguin I’ve always thought in right angles and arguments.

I’m always looking for loopholes. Not necessarily to exploit them but simply because they’re interesting. I’m interested in how laws are made and what that means for society in general.

This week I found one at the local pub. Lockdown is over and I went out with the significant other and ordered burger and chips (fries) for the first time in forever. I love chips (fries) and I love dipping them in ketchup.

In my culinary world carbs are what I use to transport more delicious items to my mouth. They’re nice to have on their own, but I prefer them to be covered in fat or sugar. I have a similar and problematic relationship with bread and butter.

Bread often constitutes the minor ingredient. Awkward.

Shuffling myself to an early grave through the medium of food is a hobby of mine. It is one of those little life pleasures that gets my cute little penguin self through the day.

The bar we attended had a special sort of Irish homemade ketchup they’d laced with crack cocaine. Okay, that’s hyperbole, there was no crack cocaine contained within but maybe some liquid dopamine.

It was very addictive. I said as much to the lovely guy who brought our food over to the table.

He dropped off a bottle for us at the table with a smile. Like a benevolent dealer. When you’ve got chips, you can have as much as you want because it’s free on the tables… but if you wanted to take some of that sweet tomato-y nectar home with you — it’d cost you the princely sum of £3.99.

Orgasmo-sauce is available to purchase behind the bar.

I’d pay it. I’d rob people to get the money. Kill for it. I’d be back every day in my low-budget pub version of Trainspotting. And then my brain did that right-angle thinking thing and I wondered….

Can I just take the sauce?

Don’t be insane Penguin, of course you can’t

Okay okay I know, but hear me out. I’m well aware that I can’t go into their fridges and help myself to a bottle of their £3.99 sauce. That’s criminal. I might be a bit of a nuisance on Medium, but I draw the line at robbing the fridges of one of my favourite pubs.

But…

If I decided mid-meal that I loved the sauce so much I up-ended the entire bottle on my plate (and then consumed it) nobody would bat an eyelid would they? I’m entitled to as much sauce as I want with my chips. There’s no sauce police or and nobody is measuring my sauce consumption.

In theory, I can have as much sauce as I want.

As a similar example, I’m a professional consumer of mayonnaise packets — I’ve never been stopped from collecting more when they’re available.

The only thing stopping me from taking home every mayonnaise packet is a sense of shame and a flimsy social contract which, it seems, isn’t worth the imaginary embossed paper we all keep it on.

Oh to be a sociopath at times like these!

And maybe I am…. because I want to know what happens if I decant my sauce into a container I bought from home? Some restaurants also allow you to take away food you’ve bought in a ‘doggy bag’. So why can’t I take a container full of sauce too? A doggy bottle.

And if they’re prepared to fill a small container of sauce… why not a large container? How much sauce can I reasonably request? A small side dish? A pint glass? A petrol can?

The petrol can seems unreasonable and they’d likely refuse… but if I’d put a pint of sauce onto my plate wouldn’t they add it to the doggy bag if I asked? So what’s the situation here?

Can I have the bastard sauce or not?

My partner argued because they were selling the sauce behind the bar, they clearly owned the recipe for the sauce. It was therefore morally dubious to take income away from them by stealing said sauce.

So why put the bloody stuff out on the table for free?

Furthermore, why do so with a bunch of wishy-washy unenforceable guidelines? Why am I compelled to base my sauce consumption on what a reasonable person would do? I love this damn sauce, I’m no longer thinking like a reasonable person.

Why should I pay for something I can have for free with a bit of penguin-esque creative thinking and dubious reasoning? I said as much.

My partner countered… ‘Maybe it’s the bottle you can’t take’….Taking the bottle would indeed be theft. It was a point well made because the bottle belongs to the pub.

The transient nature of the sauce is irrelevant.

It’s their bottle and you can’t take it away with you. Outfoxed again. So I agreed for about three seconds. In British law the definition of theft is the following.

(1)A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and “thief” and “steal” shall be construed accordingly. (Theft Act 1968)

See, theft is taking something with no intention of returning it. What if I was prepared to bring the bottle back? You can take books out of libraries using this principle and many school children remain free from arrest on a daily basis.

I am depriving them of the sauce but they’ve given me that as a gift for patronising their establishment. Also, it would be messy to give it back after I’d digested it — I suspect that’d be a crime in its own right.

I promise I would bring the bottle back when I was done. Better still I could swap my bottle for a new bottle filled they’d pre-filled with sauce. This is like a library. A one-in-one-out system of my own fiendish devising. I’m not even sure I should be doing this much work because I’m the customer after all.

They should run a service that collects empties and drops off new freshly filled bottles. The sauce-man is coming!

Please throw your answers in the comments

So I implore you to put me out of my existential legal misery. Can I have as much sauce as I want because I’ve paid for a meal? Can I decant it into my own container? If I’m not allowed can I request it as part of a doggy bag arrangement?

Am I allowed to convince staff to give me bottles of free sauce? Should I do so using only the twisted logic in this article? If I manage to do so by targeting the least experienced member of staff would it then be morally dubious? One of the staff looked like an 18-year-old newbie I could easily extort.

The level of legal training on Tik-Tok is sub-par at best.

I know, I know… this is not the sort of thing you’ve come to expect from a Penguin article. I will get back to focusing on the fallibility of human psychology and combatting societal malaise in my next article — but ketchup is occupying a lot of my brainpower at the moment.

That and the hundreds of mayonnaise packets I have secreted in every coat pocket I own. Am I going to jail?

Do I have a legal case here or am I just being a filthy sauce pervert?

Fancy more of a break from the hard-hitting socio-political stuff? Got you covered.