UK? Chips in Newspaper?
 

When i first went to England for the first times - years ago - i used to get fish and chips served in rolled up newspapers but i never see this now.
While i understand that maybe they evolved to using more hygenic paper wrappings i heard that the use of newspapers for wraps was ruled illegal by the EU beaucrats in Brussels - any truth to this or are newspapers still used as fish or chips wrap in UK or just went out of fashion.
Just curious about the EU thing - if true i bet the tabloids had a field day with that!

It is illegal - i'm not sure that the EU had much to do with it - we have enough Heath nazis over here as it is.

They now come wrapped in the paper that newspapers are printed on - without the printing.

I think it IS illegal - and a damn shame too; they just don't taste as good nowadays. It's a daft world we live in - I wonder how many people died from it!

to me it seemed so cool and utilitarian - the ultimate in recycling - don't know about health risks but thought it were fun to see how super soaked in grease the newspaper wrap would get - telling me how fattening those fish and chips were.

Some of the ingredients in printing ink are toxic; you can find things like benzene, toluene, turpentine, etc. in them. Colored inks are worse than black inks, since the pigments themselves may have toxic components, too. These substances are not a big deal if you are just looking through a printed document, but you don't want to wrap food in them, which might cause you to ingest them accidentally.

The papers used to package food are printed with inks designed specifically to be safe for the purpose.

I agree with Anthony here, I'd rather just put up with the cholesterol and saturated fat plus the unfeasibly high salt levels rather than have to worry about carcinogenic wrappings !

Perhaps the ultimate in recycling in this case would be newsprint that you could
Read
Wrap your meal in
After the meal, eat.

The loss is not irreparable: I just take unwanted sports pages, and in the shop I use my own newsprint to keep the meal warm until I m home to eat it, or to eat from as I travel.

Ben Haines, London

ben: you remind me of the ultimate in recyling or in this case cyling - in Switzerland i've had ice cream sundaes at McDonalds that came in a cup that was edible - being of cone material.
If we could make edible newsprint think of the ramifications for world hunger - we'd just ship our old papers to the third world - or maybe could feed them to animals. I know in my compost pile they suggest i put in shredded newspapers - i guess we don't eat compost and the toxic ink materials would be so minor.
But Anthony has made me think that wrapping foods such and fish and chips in newsprint is indeed a poor idea.