[imagesource: Krzysztof Puszczynski / CC0 licence]

That moment when the waiter asks if you want chips or a side of veg or a salad with your meal is always telling.

Fresh off those New Year’s resolutions, I might opt for one of the latter but as the year draws on it’s chips all the way.

At home, away from prying eyes, there is no such call to be made and chips done in the oven (or the air fryer) can be enjoyed guilt-free.

There’s just one problem – you may struggle to find frozen chips in your local store. In a nutshell, heavy import duties, put in place originally to protect our local manufacturers, are coming back to bite us in the behind.

Here’s Moneyweb:

Frozen meat and vegetable distributor Merlog Foods has requested the suspension of anti-dumping duties on frozen potato chips from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.

The International Trade Administration Commission (Itac) introduced preliminary anti-dumping duties on producers from these European countries until January next year. The duties range between 9% and 181%.

Nobody wants to see the price of a takeaway fish and chips or Gatsby rising. Please, we have suffered enough.

In South Africa, the frozen fries market is dominated by McCain, which holds around 80% of the market share. As The Daily Maverick points out, it’s not actually a lack of potatoes that is causing the drama.

Earlier this year, South Africa’s Potato Association stated that the local supply is “more than sufficient”:

The issue is a shortage of the right cultivars of potatoes that are suitable for fries, said Georg Southey, general manager of food importer Merlog Foods.

Southey told the media that the general shortage in fries supply was being compounded by market conduct, forcing other players to import to meet the growing demand for fries in the SA market.

You can add load shedding woes to the equation, as McCain has lost thousands of hours of production time this year already.

Stories regarding the shortage of a certain food item usually lead to panic buying around these parts. Leave some chips for the rest of us, you heathens.

Also, in the midst of panic buying, why is toilet paper always the first thing to disappear off the shelves?