fish-n-chips (w/ fries)
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Wrap in tabloid newspaper shaped like a cone. If lacking, a plate will have to suffice.My mom was born in London. She remembers the blitz. She was a little girl, hiding under the table while the German bombs fell ...
When I turned 18, she decided to take me back to "the old country" and I got to see Britain for the first time. I remember how awkward it was not just to drive on the left, but to sit on the right and stick-shift with my left. I remember how boring the English food was, how excellent the Indian food was, and I remember how fish-n-chips was always served in a newspaper.
This past Friday night, as we drove the last hour of our roadtrip home, the wife and I were discussing what to do about dinner. With two cats in the car, we didn't want to stop for a leisurely meal, and neither of us wanted to cook when we got home. I told her I craved fish-n-chips, but I didn't know where we could get any. She reminded me that the pizza parlor just down the block from our apartment had "fish and chips (with fries)" on their menu. (I know I'm not the only one to figure that "chips (with fries)" ought to mean a double-portion of chips/fries.)
I'll not mention the giggling teenage girls at the pizza place, or the Eastern European guy who was trying to sound British by saying "oh, bugger!" when he forgot to order a side dish and "fanTAStic!" when told that he could indeed use the facilities. I won't mention the delivery guy who told the guy looking for work in "acting or teaching" to apply for a job at our local food co-op, or the pierced-eyebrow cashier with the barcode tattoo on the back of his neck, or the beautiful young man with the crewcut who prepared our dinner and who offered the delivery guy a dollar to give him a ride, saying, "You can get 10 minutes of long-distance phone calls for a dollar: just dial 10-10-220!"
In fact, I won't mention anything about the meal itself, because the reason I bring all of this up is that I asked myself for the first time on Friday night why exactly fish-n-chips traditionally come wrapped in newspaper. (Ours didn't: they came in a Styrofoam box, sadly.)
At 18, I just treated it as a curious cultural difference. I didn't wonder why the fish-n-chips didn't come in, for instance, butcher's paper, or why the merchants didn't buy newspaper stock sans newsprint. I just treated it as a charming detail of my travels and kept tucked away safely in the back of my mind the question of whether or not I was ingesting the ink from the newspaper.But the other night I asked myself all these questions (except for the part about the ink, about which I no longer seem to care), and the answer came to me from a combination of (a) a childhood memory in which we visited The New York Times on a school daytrip, and (b) the question furious asked a while back about the role of marketing/advertising in the general economic benefits of free-market capitalism.
I've blogged before on an 8th-grade indoctrination trip to the ILGWU. Now I recall another field trip that year to the Times. We learned many fascinating things, only two of which I still remember: (1) the obituary department keeps draft obituaries uptodate for celebrities who aren't dead yet, and (2) it costs something like $2 to produce a 50¢ paper.
A paper that costs the reader 50¢ to purchase costs the company $2 to produce? Yes. If I've gotten the numbers wrong, the basic point is still the same: it costs several times more to put out a single unit than is charged for that unit. The rest of the cost, plus profit, comes from advertising.
Advertising is paid for (indirectly, but nevertheless) by consumers of the products advertised. So all those subway commuters I used to see on my ride to school were reading subsidized material -- news and entertainment subsidized by the consumers of various things other than newspapers.
It seems to me that it's not just possible but even likely that a newspaper costs less than the paper it's printed on, in which case it's cheaper to buy newspapers in which to wrap fish-n-chips (you didn't think those food merchants just used the newspapers they'd already happened to read, did you?) than it would be to buy the ink-free paper the printers purchase.
So the folks who eat fish-n-chips get their meal cheaper because of the grease-stained advertising under their lunch -- advertising they probably never bother reading. Three cheers for the voluntary redistribution of wealth!
(Anyway, that's my educated guess. Anyone whose guess is more educated, please let me know.)
Update -- another educated guesser (by the name of gives a much simpler explanation:
"I think the author overcomplicates things: the value of day-old newspapers is basically zero - the fishsellers most likely got them for free from news merchants who would have had to dispose of them some other way."
11 Comments:
Loved this post. I was completely absorbed in your prose before I realized you were going to make a point--nicely done. And well answered.
By the way, apropos of your "I'll not mention" paragraph, if you do not know the Woody Guthrie song "Walt Whitman's Niece," as set to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco, you should find it asap. It's use of the not-mentioning conceit is almost as good as yours.
To step out of the realm of economics, the reason that it's layers of newsprint rather than butcher's paper or styrofoam that the optimal Fish and Chips is wrapped in is that newsprint alone of these substances has a nearly limitless capacity to soak up excess grease. This allows the fried delights to be bagged while still hot and greasy, and yet be warm and crispy when you eat them. In the absence of newsprint, they would have to be foul and greasy (more likely) or slow and cold (if allowed to drain properly).
Sadly, most fish and chip shops in my experience (London area) now use blank newsprint to wrap the food.
Want to bet that this is the result of some EU hygene regulation?
i think it's the eu directive on post consumer packaging waste that's more likely to blame for the demise of the newspaper-wrapped portion of fish and chips. I'm from manchester and i haven't seen fish and chips wrapped in newspaper for years now. It's likely that the huge government funded paper mills at Aylesford and Shotton can pay more for surplus newspaper than the humble chippy...
As to the marginal cost of producing newspapers, I believe it is more like 2 cents. My accounting professor, who apparently used to fill newspaper boxes, mentioned this when he was explaining why it was better to come back to a box with just one paper in the box than an empty box. "You coulda sold more." However, it is quite possible that the average cost is around where you place it.
Came here from the Agitator. It's an interesting point, but FWIW, I lived in London from 1999-2001 and never saw fish and chips in newspaper. It was always a cone of rough blank paper.
I grew up, in the 60s and 70s, in one of England's biggest fishing ports, so needless to say that F'n'C was a common meal. Even then, it would be wrapped first in a layer of plain paper, and then with newsprint on the outside , for the sake of "presentation".
This long predates any sort of EU regulation.
Why was newsprint used in the past? I think the author overcomplicates things: the value of day-old newspapers is basically zero - the fishsellers most likely got them for free from news merchants who would have had to dispose of them some other way.
I didn't know fish-n-chips needed newsprint until yesterday, when a co-worker from the UK told me how important it was.
When I saw this post today, I asked what she thought and here is her reply:
" He wasn't in the right place, his experiences weren't authentic at all!
It's actually put first in white greaseproof kind of paper and then wrapped in newspaper to keep it warm. Now most places use white paper but it did start during the war and it was a way of "recycling". Best is still up north, where I was born. The small original little "hole in the wall" places have the best taste!"
Hey, c'mon. Guess I'm older than the lot of you. In Oct 1945, the Starving Castle (OK, Stirling C), out of Karachi, put in at Liverpool, and I had four days in Blighty before sailing out of Southhampton. From L'pool through London and on south, I had F&C couple times a day; squirt vinegar, shake salt. Newspapers only. Remember well because I unrolled one and saw advertisements on the Front Page! Never once saw any ''white greaseproof kind of paper.'' Only ''used'' newspapers. Alex
Hey, c'mon. Guess I'm older than the lot of you. In Oct 1945, the Starving Castle (OK, Stirling C), out of Karachi, put in at Liverpool, and I had four days in Blighty before sailing out of Southhampton. From L'pool through London and on south, I had F&C couple times a day; squirt vinegar, shake salt. Newspapers only. Remember well because I unrolled one and saw advertisements on the Front Page! Never once saw any ''white greaseproof kind of paper.'' Only ''used'' newspapers. Alex
Hey, c'mon. Guess I'm older than the lot of you. In Oct 1945, the Starving Castle (OK, Stirling C), out of Karachi, put in at Liverpool, and I had four days in Blighty before sailing out of Southhampton. From L'pool through London and on south, I had F&C couple times a day; squirt vinegar, shake salt. Newspapers only. Remember well because I unrolled one and saw advertisements on the Front Page! Never once saw any ''white greaseproof kind of paper.'' Only ''used'' newspapers. Alex
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