A family from Narborough, Leicestershire, have received an overwhelming amount of support from people sending packets of chips to feed their child.
Wait… What?
It sounds super strange but there is a little girl in England with a condition that has led to her being reliant on Walkers oven-baked sea salt-flavour chips to survive.
Ava is a 4-year-old with a number of conditions including a very rare genetic syndrome called Cohen syndrome. The condition can cause digestive issues and subsequently, Ava now suffers from ARFID (Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder) meaning that she struggles to have an appetite and anything that she can eat is better than eating nothing at all.
All of this leads us back to the chips… Luckily for Ava’s family, Ava will eat Walker’s sea salt flavoured chips so they have become a must-have item in their household.
Unfortunately, Walkers has been going through a nationwide shortage due to a glitch during an IT upgrade that is only just starting to be rectified.
Ava’s family shared the story of their child’s dependency on the salty snack in a plea of desperation, worried that Ava wouldn’t have any food to eat.
Ava’s mother, Michelle told the BBC, ‘[Me and my husband] go looking round the shops for the crisps every day for an hour or two. We have a big extended family and everyone is looking out for them too.”
“There’s not a huge nutritional value in the crisps but the salt helps. It makes her drink more.”
The family were shocked at the help they received from the public.
Most people are kind – Twitter users offering to help Michelle and her 4 year old with an eating disorder who partly relies on a certain flavour of walkers crisps 👇 pic.twitter.com/ckldUfmXtl
— Victoria Derbyshire (@vicderbyshire) November 18, 2021
Michelle exclaimed, “I think we’ve received about 450 packets and we’ve been able to send them out to other families who are searching for these crisps.”
It’s not clear whether those other families in need of the chips also had children with ARFID or if they just had a serious case of the munchies and desperately wanted to get their hands on these specific chippies.
