Collateral damage of Ukraine war: Britain’s beloved fish and chip shops
It is a perilous time for fish and chips, the golden fried food for the masses, celebrated as Britain’s ‘‘favourite meal’’ and ‘‘the national dish’’.
As it turns out, a lot of that fish comes from Russian trawlers and the sunflower oil from Ukrainian fields.
With Russia’s war raging in Ukraine, that means skyrocketing prices for hungry Brits. The ingredients for an order of fish and chips – by design cheap and caloric – now cost more than twice as much as at the start of the year.
And so we find ourselves with
Andrew Crook, president of the National Federation of Fish Friers, standing outside of a shuttered ‘‘chippy’’ in this small town about 30km northwest of Manchester. His organisation estimates that a third of the United Kingdom’s 10,500 fish and chip shops will go out of business in the coming year.
‘‘We’ve survived through two world wars, a depression, multiple recessions. We’ve never seen anything like this,’’ said Crook, who owns a nearby shop, Skippers of Euxton, where he is about to raise prices in the hope of staying afloat.
Your average chip shop has always run on tight margins. But owners say they never imagined they would be victims of a 21st-century globalised commodity economy upended by World War II-style artillery engagements in Europe and then crippled by a naval blockade in the Black Sea.
This is our new world.
It’s hard to overstate the centrality of the chippy in British life – the traditional family business, aromatic with grease, gleaming with stainless steel friers, where the orders are dosed in salt and vinegar (or gravy or curry), before being tidily wrapped in a sheet of paper. Even if many owners these days are recent immigrants, the shops remain one of the most reliable of British institutions.