We have a potato shortage

and the chips are down! Chips are scarce! They are even off the menu in some places! There are limits to how many packets of frozen chips you can buy in the supermarket! This is an absolute disaster!

Well yes, we do have a potato shortage at the present time. The chief reason for it has been the weather. Flooded potato fields do cause supply problems. I feel concerned for the farmers who own the fields, who have done all the back breaking work, who have lost any hope of any income from those fields.

I also feel concerned for the owners of fish and chip shops, of cafes where chips and potato wedges should be appearing on the menu. 

I must also confess I am partial to the occasional hot chip. I am even quite fussy about hot chips. I like them crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. I don't want them drowning in fat or oil. And they need to have just the right amount of salt, not too much.  Good hot chips are a rare breed. They tend to be expensive for my budget. I do not indulge very often. 

At my last university I lived in self-catering student accommodation unit. There were eleven of us  in the unit. It was part of my role to keep an eye on the younger students and to do so as unobtrusively as possible. 

Apart from ensuring nobody was anorexic and everyone had enough to eat I didn't worry too much about what they were eating. In fact most of them ate remarkably sensibly and well on very limited budgets. We sometimes had shared meals. If that happened the boys would go to the halal butcher and get the meat so I could make small pasties for everyone.  I would use the one brand of pastry sheets they approved of too. The mother of one boy lived not too far away. He sometimes went home for the weekend and she would send him back with big bags of home made Italian biscotti for us all to enjoy. 

In the general way the students would use the shared kitchen without too much trouble. They never once came to me about arguments. I used to wonder about this. How could ten students from such disparate backgrounds get along so well together? There were three Muslims, a Sikh, a Hindu and a devout Catholic from Argentina. Even the other four came from families who had migrated no more than two generations before. How did they manage to get along so well?

No, it was not hot chips but it might have been rice cooker, or more than one rice cooker. It was the boys who used the rice cookers the most. If I looked into the kitchen in the late afternoon there would often be two or even three rice cookers gently cooking away. The boys would come back and put in plain rice and water and set them going. When it was done they would pile it on to a plate, sprinkle it with soy sauce and consume it as an afternoon snack. It was much cheaper than chips even when there was no potato shortage. It was less effort too. Often the exercise would be repeated when they finally decided it was time to eat at night. Then they would add a few vegetables and a little protein. It was not the best of diets perhaps but it was adequate and it was within their budgets.

But if they did not have time for this? Then there were the "pot noodles". Only the boys ate pot noodles. I have never eaten a pot noodle pack but there were plenty of those too. I suspect they were the equivalent of hot chips for many of them. A shortage of pot noodles would have been considered a disaster. It was what they went to when there constraints on time or they wanted a more flavoursome food fix. 

We girls ate the biscotti and, when we could afford it, fruit as snacks. But I wonder about hot chips? If they had been easy and cheap to do would we have succumbed to the temptation?