VFOOD1380 | Items benefiting from the relief: What is food?: Food of a kind used for human consumption: Palatability
From HM Revenue & Customs · VAT Food
In early cases, the tribunal considered the question of palatability in deciding whether a product was or was not food. While this may be relevant in the case of some ready-to-eat products (although palatability is a very subjective measure), there are many commodities used as food ingredients which would generally be regarded as food but are wholly unpalatable looked at alone: flour is an obvious example.