Have they completely stopped selling fish & chips wrapped in newspapers? And when was the practice outlawed? Do you feel the practice of serving food in this manner threatened public health?
Didn’t most papers move to soy-based inks a long time ago?
Good question. The issue here isn’t strictly speaking fish and chips, but rather, newspaper and ink.
What makes you think it was outlawed? And in which jurisdictions? I’m not disagreeing w you, I simply don’t know and IIRC have never heard of that idea.
I heard it. THEY said so.
Honestly, I don’t recall where I heard it. Maybe a British YouTube video a few months ago? I know, not exactly an unimpeachable source.
I remember that when I was a little boy I sold the newspapers my father had read to the poultry stand in the market in Madrid for a pittance. They never wrapped food in newspapers, they wrapped the food that was already well wrapped in thin cardboard or parchment paper, coated in plastic or wax, in an additional layer of newspaper to absorb the blood that dripped through. It was the same at the fishmonger and at the butcher. The ink did not contact the food, at least not if the seller was any good.
Are you saying that in the UK fish & chips were served on newspapers without anything between the food and the newspaper? In Spain and Germany it was not like that.
The market of my childhood has long closed. Today I suppose they wrap the poultry in plastic and put that in an additonal plastic bag, sealed with a self-adherent sticker with a code bar, if the poultry is not pre-packaged straight from the factory. I am not sure this is an improvement.
I am not even sure the newspapers are forbidden, it’s just that the economy has moved in the direction of more plastic at the source, more waste, less work down the line. It is more profitable that way.
And kids lost that meagre source of income. Who reads printed newspapers anyway? Now try wrapping fish & chips on a tablet. Bon appétit!
Not sure about the UK, but where I grew up (Asia), we did get foods served directly wrapped in newspapers. Sometimes you’d still find printed letters & sentence fragments that had transferred onto the outer part of the food, which I’d carefully bite or peel off. Being grossed out by that was how I first learned about soy-based inks…
There isn’t as much newspaper as there once was, and what newspaper exists is a lot more expensive than it used to be. Fish and chip shops may have switched to other materials because of the cost and limited availability of newsprint.
I don’t remember ever seeing actual newspapers used and I am a Brit in my forties. So my anecdotal evidence is, it was banned at least 35 years ago. The paper has always been of a similar type (no pun intended) to newspaper paper, but without the ink.
Are there any Brits in their 60’s or older around to tell the tale? My assumption regarding the use of newspaper (historically) is that it was an inexpensive material that was readily available (at least when dead tree newspapers were a big thing), and also soaked up some of the grease from the fried food.
Perhaps not in but rather on, as recent as five years ago.
ETA: our local chippie went out of existence circa 2013 but they also used newsprint.
To be fair, I’ve probably had chips served in/on something like that photo at some point, but I assume the OP was about real papers rather than mock ones.
That looks like specially printed paper. It’s title is The Daily Catch and it’s all about Fish & Chips. Also, it’s pristine.
(ninja-ed!)
Blame the Herald.
And yes, the fish and the chips come wrapped in newspaper, hopefully one containing this story.
Also British and in my 40s- I have a vague memory of it being used as an outer layer when I was small, but there was always another white paper inner layer.
I’ve just done a bit of random searching and apparently it was originally wrapped straight in the unsold newspapers, but that was banned in 1976 under an law from the now EU, which prohibited use of packaging which could chemically alter the contents- print would often be transferred to the chips, print which could contain lead if you go back far enough.
Best I can tell, using it as an outer layer probably disappeared following the 1990 food safety act, which tightened up the rules on manufacturing food packaging material, which would square with my vague early childhood memories. The places we regularly visited didn’t use it back then- I suspect having to use multiple paper types was enough of a pain to put shops off even if they wanted to use it- but I’m sure I remember having chips on holiday that had an outer newspaper layer and my parents getting all nostalgic.
I’m not actually sure if it is technically completely banned or it’s just too much faff to 100% guarantee it complies with the law. The newspaper companies collect and pulp the unsold papers now anyway.
Hello! (Waves)
Yes, fish and chips was served in newspapers - I can remember this from a little more than 50 years ago. This was the invariable practice in a chippie we used to go to on our summer holidays, so I can place the date reasonably well.
As I recall the health concerns didn’t stem directly from the ink, but rather from contamination of the ink from the lead lettering (etc) used in printing the papers.
I don’t remember exactly when serving in newspaper stopped, but I remember an interim period when newspaper was still used, but only to wrap fish and chips which had been put in a grease proof paper bag.
If I google fish and chips in newspaper the AI summary says
Fish and chips used to be wrapped in newspaper because it was a cheap, readily available, and absorbent way to serve takeaway food, especially during World War II when paper was scarce. However, this practice was phased out in the 1980s due to health concerns about toxic chemicals in the ink, such as lead, and is now largely illegal in many places.
j
ETA - partially ninja’d. Hi @Filbert!
As a separate thought, I think one of the reasons that newspaper was used (purely from memory, this) was to do with how the sales of newspapers worked at the time. Newsagents effectively worked on a sale-or-return basis - any papers that you didn’t sell, you would be reimbursed for - but rather than returning the full paper for a “refund” (or credit, or whatever), you just had to provide the banner (top of the front page) as evidence of the unsold copies.This left the newsagents with unsold newsprint of almost zero value - so passing it off to a chippie at very low cost made sense all round (apart from poisoning people, obviously).
Not sure if this was true for all newspapers or just the national tabloids.
j
How does this work…? The newsagent would have to take the front page off every packet of papers and then trim it to just the top? Wouldn’t that take more in labor alone than they’d get back?
I’m guessing that there were relatively few copies of newspapers left unsold (or the business model wouldn’t work), so the newsagent might only have to rip the banner off the front page of twenty or thirty copies, the work of a couple of minutes. But leaving quite a quantity of chip wrapper.
Mrs Trep had a Saturday job in a newsagent’s when she was at school, and she thinks that a sale-or-return system was in place (but she doesn’t know the details, because she was on the sweet counter).
I may try a google when I have time.
j
See also Stripped book - Wikipedia for more about proof of unsold returns in the publishing biz.