IF YOU are in farming or a small business or are trying to complete your self-assessment income tax return, I'd put this column down now, if I were you. We're in red tape wonderland again this week.

If you're still with me, just be careful next time you have fish and chips. That's not salt and vinegar you're shaking over them, it's sodium chloride and acetic acid. Not seasonings but "substances" - and if you're having smoked salmon for a treat, go easy on the citric acid (lemon juice), too.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned in passing the almost unbelievable announcement that the EU was to test 30,000 chemicals used in everyday items. It's worse than I feared as it doesn't get much more everyday than salt, vinegar and lemon juice. We don't think of them as "chemicals" yet, if new EU rules go ahead next year, they could be entangled in an evaluation of such things to see which can be authorised.

Oh, it's so comforting to feel that the jacks-in-office in Brussels care so much about our welfare that even things we've used for years without ill effect are going to be checked.

Thirty thousand of them? I've heard a timescale of more than ten years mentioned, but no-one has said where all the trained staff are to come from. Maybe there's a euro-mountain of out-of-work toxicologists sitting around waiting for the call.

There will also be a Euro agency (no surprise there) which will amass information and check registrations. It won't do anything except contact individual governments, which may ask manufacturers for more tests and the results will be passed back to the Euro authority ... I think we came in here.

But it gets worse. The bigger the amount of any chemical produced, the more stringent the tests. That's fair enough, but progress would be random and not, as you might think logical, with the most likely to be dodgy tested first and those we've used happily for years, like salt, vinegar and baking soda, pushed to the back of the queue.

Dr Judith Hackett, director general of the Chemical Industries Association, reckons testing will cost £4bn-£5bn in the next ten years. Campaigners against the use of animals for testing see a very bleak future and a quick trawl gave me estimates of the number of animals involved ranging from 10m to a staggering 50.2m.

It isn't all tightly tied up in its red tape yet, but the tapeworm is on the move and I can see nothing to stop it.

With a further care for our well-being, the EU is also to look at food labels carrying health claims like "high fibre" or "low fat". After all, there are no rules on that yet, so it might be as well to insist claims are proved before they go on labels.

At the back of my mind in all this is a term from long-ago history lessons: Code Napolon. That gentleman left much of mainland Europe the legacy of a legal system under which everything is forbidden unless it is specifically permitted. We Brits can do everything, unless it is specifically forbidden.

There is a world of difference. Vive la diffrence!

* Just to show that Brussels isn't all bad, the bureaucrats have plans to stop us receiving e-mail "spam", the electronic equivalent of junk mail. With luck, after October, it will be illegal to send spam and advertisers won't be able to contact us unless we click an "opt in" box.

Meanwhile, and in case it doesn't happen, I'll continue to use a separate e-mail address for ordering and inquiries and just delete any sender I don't recognise in that inbox.