Confusion is unappetising

That has a ‘New food and plant regulations’ tab, and within that is a ‘travelling to the EU’ section. The last isn’t Eurostar’s at all, but an official EU webpage which is very complicated.

I assume the relevant section is the one that says: “Travellers are not allowed to bring in meat, milk or their products, unless they are coming with less than ten kilograms of these products from the Faeroe Islands [sic] or Greenland.”

So, provided you bought a ham sandwich from the Faroe branch of M&S Simply Food (and it weighs less than 10kg), it seems you’re OK. But if you bought it at the St Pancras branch, you’re not!

Eurostar told me that this is also referred to in pre-travel emails sent to those with a booking, and that it isn’t aware of any issues.

It seems that in general you will never be stopped from taking food onto Eurostar trains for consumption during your journey, and that the above rules only apply if you take the food off the train. In addition, there are no restrictions returning to the UK.

Taking food off the train is not pedantic. If your Eurostar journey is perhaps St Pancras to Berlin via Brussels, why wouldn’t you take food to last the whole day and thereby take a chunk of your rations off at Brussels?

So, I go back to what I said about the Eurostar website above: it’s appalling for its lack of clarity. For something as important as telling customers what they can take on board and off the other end, it warrants a proper panel: ‘Taking food on the train’.

To expect users to dig into a Brexit Hub, then Customs, and then interpret a food and plant regulations web page is just not good enough.