JOURNALISTS AND TOILET PAPER..

Posted by Stelios Theocharous June 30, 2010 - 7:22 am

I have been thinking about what to write for my blog now for the last couple of days, I had some really random ideas. However this morning there was a moment when I had a sign, a sign of a good idea and it was my phone buzzing off and there it was the rant on the other end of the phone which made me aware to a piece of toilet paper journalism that was written in the Sunday Times and it is something that has been printed in Fish & Chips & Fast Food trade magazine, So I set upon to do a little research and figure out what had been happening.

Don’t you just love the drama that some journo’s add to their articles it is all doom and gloom and some of them have absolutely no idea on the fish and chip industry but because we are a defenceless industry they may as well take a shot as no one will come back and say anything. I don’t want to focus on one article or one journalist, the truth is everyone loves to compare all of their food to fish and chips purely because a lot of the support and big money that the huge chains have is not available in the fish and chips industry.

The fish and chip shop sector has come a long way in the last 10 years or so, we are no longer your dirty little shop with poor lighting and awful greasy food. They are a network of 10,000 independent retailers; believe it or not they are a massive boost to the economy because they employ thousands of people. I am not going to come on here and say that all of those 10,000 fish and chip shops are the best and they all serve great fish and chips but the vast majority do sell great fish and chips and do care about the products they buy and sell. I took away a sample of fish, chips and peas from a fish and chip shop that uses our batter mix and the results came back that the fat content was 4.98% which falls well below the industry average.

The fish and chip shop industry has invested into high efficiency frying ranges and now using on average 30% less gas and more shops are taking on this technology so as a whole we will be frying better, we now fry at higher temperatures which means that the food is sealed quicker and does not boil at the bottom of the pan. The fish and chip shop industry uses three main types of frying mediums, Rapeseed Oil which is sourced from the UK, Sustainable Palm Oil which does not come from areas like Borneo which has been reduced to nothing and pillaged of anything worth having, and then Beef Dripping the traditional choice with low environmental impact.

Like I wrote a couple of blogs ago, our fish comes from a ‘responsible’ source, with fish coming frozen at sea from the Faroese fishing vessels and from the Barents sea, we are getting cod and haddock from ‘responsible’ fishing grounds, and we are massive advocates of keeping what has come out of the water instead of throwing it back in the sea for the seagulls to feast on.

Then there is the evil packaging that we see littered on all the streets of towns and rural villages, our industry is the only industry to move forward and start using card that can be recycled, paper from recycled sources and can be recycled and now a new technology which is packaging from sugar cane and it would have traditionally been thrown in the bin but it makes brilliant packaging and also is fully biodegradable, so by putting it in compost heap when finished that’s it voila..

What annoys me is when ignorant journalist, charities and organisations publish a stupid report without talking to the industry, there is plenty of people they can get the correct information from and to those in the industry let’s start standing shouting from the roof tops about the great efforts we go too and when we see negative journalism start sending some letters to counteract this, let the right people know and get on to our fish and chips networking sites and tell as many people as you can, there is support out there.

This is our national dish; we invented it 150 years ago and were re inventing it now.