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Comment by dguaraglia | Hacker News Reader

What mattashii said: newspaper ink has (or at least used to have) lots of lead. I'm not sure how bad it is, but I'd imagine that long-term you might want to avoid it. Specially when something as easy to find as a potato or a bunch of leaves will do the same job without the risk :)

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> but I'd imagine that long-term you might want to avoid it.

It's safe now. People use it for compost all the time.

The real danger from a BBQ is smoke.

The whole point of barbecue is indirect cooking with smoke.

Unless y'all mean grilling when you say BBQ.

That's just one of the many words that have different meanings in different countries. We Australians take our barbecueing very seriously and it rarely involves indirect cooking. :-) The most common form of barbecueing here involves cooking on a flat hotplate over direct heat.

The tragic thing about this is that it prevents people in places like the northeastern US from realising that the phenomenon of real BBQ exists. I know that until met my wife at age 23, I had never even seen actual slow-cooked collagen-has-turned-to-gelatin BBQ.

This isn't an instance of the Scotsman fallacy, it is a genuine category error.

Exactly. I'm originally from Texas, where they have a pretty serious idea about what the label "BBQ" means. And it absolutely does not mean grilling burgers over charcoal.

I remember on one of those restaurant impossible/kitchen nightmare type shows where the restaurant was a BBQ place.

Host: do you know BBQ actually is?

Restaurant owner: the sauce?

Right. My wife grew up in Houston.

I noticed this difference when I moved in Australia a couple of years ago. My first guess would be that hot plates are safer than fires from a wild fire point of view (which are quite a concern in Australia), and this is now engrained in the culture. However, I could be wrong and it has always been like this. Any thoughts?

Then you Australians aren't actually barbecuing, are you? ;)

is this for real ? I've always meant grilling and assumed anyone else meant the same :(

EDIT: might be a linguistic issue, wikipedia has different meanings of BBQ in different languages.

Yea, if you hear "BBQ" and think "grilling", then you might be missing out on the phenomenon that is real southern BBQ, which is a significantly different culinary phenomenon.

Growing up in the northeast US, I didn't learn about the existence of BBQ until I was 23.

Sadly this was the case for me until Dinosaur BBQ made their way into the local scene.

Now I smoke my own pork shoulders, ribs and chicken. And its much cheaper this way :)

A former colleague of mine, a man in his seventies, told us a story from when he served in the Soviet army as a young man. He served with a guy who used to wipe his individual plate and utensils with the newspaper they got. Others warned him about the lead but he dismissed the warnings. After a while, he ended up with lead poisoning.

I don't think I heard how long it took for him to get it or how severe it was.

Could have been ammo related too.

Quite possible! I understand that they thought the lead in the newspaper ink was the culprit because nobody else in their unit did the same and nobody else got lead poisoning, but obviously, it could have been coincidental. I've tried researching just how much lead one could consume this way but never found anything conclusive.

I believe in the UK the old ink that came off on your hands was made from soot and old engine oil. That's why you see people in PG Wodehouse and Downton Abbey getting their newspapers ironed - so it doesn't rub off on your hands.

I would guess that the old-school lead type probably also had some bearing on that. Modern press plates are usually aluminum (or sometimes even polymers).

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