Japan is in the grip of a potato chip panic

A Japanese boy looks at potato chips
(Image credit: Yoshikazu Tsuno/Getty Images)

A Japanese snack company called Calbee announced Monday it would stop selling 18 types of potato chips and suspend the sale of 15 more after a bad potato harvest made normal production impossible. Faced with a shortage of the crispy snack, Japanese consumers have since gone on a chip-buying spree, emptying store shelves and reselling bags of chips for as much as six times their normal price online.

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A second Japanese brand, Koikeya, has likewise discontinued seven chip varieties, compounding the panic. Koikeya uses exclusively Japanese potatoes, the bulk of which are grown on a single island that was damaged by typhoons last year.

Calbee was importing American potatoes to supplement its supply, but decided they are "of insufficient quality and cannot cover the deficits" — which is totally fine, because it means Americans get to enjoy more of the cheap, delicious snack that we invented.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.