Goodbye, fist o’ chips

something of the same problem.

Perhaps ever so slightly upscaled, given that the Irish potato famine during her reign resulted in one million deaths, another million-plus Irish fleeing to escape starvation, and such bitterness at oppressive English laws that had the populace so reliant on that single crop that it became a rallying point for the nationalist movement.

Mind you, we’re facing privations in NZ too. It’s been reported we may be facing months of reduced availability of favourite snackfoods. We don’t want to be alarmist, and indeed, indications yesterday were that rumours of the great chip shortage of 2017 may have been somewhat exaggerated.

But we cannot discount the dire possibility that shoppers are forced to turn to entirely wrong vegetables for their chipular fixes. Kale chips anybody?

Nutritionists may harbour some hopes that this will prove helpfully interruptive to the bad habits into which the nation has undoubtedly fallen. A chance to try, perhaps embrace, healthier alternatives. However it’s at least as likely that we’ll see the same as we did during the dark days of the post-quake Marmite shortage, where a period of enforced abstinence merely increases the desirability of a product never again to be taken for granted.

Tempting though it really, really is to trivialise this story, a measure of concern should be extended to farmers specialising in crisping potatoes who are doing it tough from a particularly wet season.

Which, in turn, has led to warnings that what we are seeing here isn’t simply a case of spasmodically unhelpful weather, but climate change influenced by human activities.

For many years we have been warned about more extreme weather, more frequent and severe storms, higher sea levels, deserts getting drier, water shortages in already parched areas, increased disease in humans and animals, rising rates of animal and plant extinction, loss of habitats, and, significantly, food and crop shortages.

Not so much the occasional unavailability of thick-cut sour cream and chives chips.That really is a First World problem.

But the sort of shortages that lead to starvation and malnutrition, now that’s a bigwide-world problem.