"Get the boys a bag of spuds"
The Irish food-filled masterpiece that radicalized me
As a born-and-bred Hibernophile who makes colcannon on the reg, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in America has always felt a little strange. Mostly it’s the fact that we use it as an excuse to get dangerously drunk on cheap, green-dyed beer, and say weird things about redheads (note: I am a red head), but I also feel weird about celebrating a Catholic holiday to celebrate a cultural group that we strongly oppressed and ostracized up until the 1960s. To be clear, I’m all for making up for past ills with cultural celebrations, but I think we’ve missed the mark when we’re promoting St. Patrick’s Day events with innuendos using corny barely-Irish phrases and drink specials.
To combat stereotype and make a dent in the deep-fryingification of American St. Patrick’s Day, as a child I insisted that my family read Irish folklore, eat my poorly made soda bread, and sometimes I begged my Dad to track down some peat for our fireplace (a hard thing to come by in central Texas). We listened to NPR’s Thistle and Shamrock Celtic music appreciation program religiously, perhaps without realizing till much later that its host hails from Scotland, not Ireland. But none of these things truly helped me understand the plight of Irish immigrants or the ongoing cultural complexities of contemporary Ireland. What radicalized me? The 2001 Disney Channel Original Movie American sports comedy-drama film, The Luck of the Irish.
When Kyle loses his golden pot-of-gold charm, he discovers that he is actually part leprechaun. He must find the thief who took the charm before he takes control of all the leprechauns. Along the way, Kyle discovers that he is capable of making his own luck.
The description from Disney fails to include the crucial part where he reunites with his estranged potato-chip factory owning grandfather whom he originally believes to have stolen the charm, but in fact was helping him all along. AND that the charm helps Kyle’s entire family (including the extended clan O’Reilly) pass for human in modern day America.
A work of visual art, not unlike other Disney Channel Original Movies of the late 1990s/early aughts, has its flaws to be sure, but none of them are related to the storytelling about Irish culture and history. In fact, the Americanized Irish stereotypes used in the film—including leprechaun references, a thieving Riverdance-esque troop, and even a fixation on potatoes—are all delivered with a dark (as dark as Disney can get anyway) Irish humor and a wee bit of Swiftian satire. Beyond the Irish-centric theme, the film opens with the impending school celebration of Heritage Day, a multicultural festival helmed by his maybe-friend Bonnie Lopez who is excited to celebrate her Latina culture. Other radicalizing moments from the film include a moment when all seems lost and Bonnie reminds Kyle that when the Irish first came to America “they had to work at jobs other people wouldn't take, and they didn't get paid what they deserved,” promptly followed by Kyle’s best friend Russel, who is Black, saying “Well, at least they got paid.” (*chefs kiss*). And at the end of the film, Bonnie, Kyle, and the rest of the Heritage Day assembly sing "This Land Is Your Land,” a well known protest song by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. (*another chefs kiss*).
The video title below is misleading. Disney does make the joke, but through a Black character as the kids are talking about heritage (and by extension the construction of whiteness and American identity myths). The film respects the history of Irish mistreatment in America while also not forgetting the much larger historical impact of the enslavement of Black people.
Despite being a sports comedy-drama, food is central to the film. To demonstrate her Americanness at the beginning of the film, Kyle’s mother serves her family foods that are coded as white, middle class, early aughts American foods including fruit bars and yogurt for breakfast to “keep your energy up” and vaguely ethnic noodle dishes she finds in “Eat Smart magazine.” At dinner, Kyle asks “So, is this like Italian food or something? I just thought, you know, maybe it was, like, an old family recipe,” as his parents evade questioning instead telling him that he’s lucky his mom makes “such healthy meals” (watch the clip here). They smile awkwardly while twirling what looks like some kind of cold pan-Asian-inspired noodle dish on their plates: “We're Americans, Kyle. That's all the heritage we need.”
Once the lucky coin is lost and Kyle’s mother starts reverting into her leprechaun form, one of the first signs of her change is her cooking. She cooks on an open fire in the living room fire place (rather than the modern 1990s kitchen) and the unusual smell of bacon wakes Kyle. Her hair is unbound and she’s speaking with an lilt she didn’t have before. She admits to Kyle, that they’re Irish.
Oh, I wanted to protect you, Kyle, from the way it was when the Irish first came to America. From the jokes and the dirty jobs nobody else would take, and the signs in the shop windows saying, "No Irish need apply." I wanted you to be 100% American.
She passes him a massive plate laden with “hen's eggs and a rasher of bacon, potato cakes, bangers, and a black-and-white pudding,” and tells him she’s packed “crubeens and colcannon” for his lunch.
Food is integral to Kyle’s heritage, so much so that upon arriving in America his grandfather opened a production factory centered on the very ingredient that was so intrinsically tied to his homeland’s plight. Often erroneously called the Irish Potato Famine, the Great Famine or the Great Hunger was a period of effectively forced mass starvation, disease, and social upheaval in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852. A host of issues led to the famine—which did include a massive potato blight in an area that were largely dependent upon monocrop agriculture—but the real culprit here was capitalism and ethnic persecution. This era was followed by a massive wave of Irish immigration to the United States, where the cultural group faced additional oppression.
In a rather dark moment, the granddad demonstrates the importance of starting his potato chip factory, the importance of having power and agency again:
“A thousand years of invasion and oppression, being forced from the land. A thousand years of stony fields and famine, saying goodbye forever as you get on a boat for a distant shore. Now, when we've finally made it, here in America and are just about to have all our luck, you've lost it!”
Ever a Disney film, there a silly food moments, too, like when it is implied that the granddad is much older than he seems and was in fact the inventor of the original potato chip when he was a short-order chef back in the late 1800s. During a chase scene, the thieving Riverdance troop hurl a plate of corned beef and cabbage out their tour bus windows at Kyle and his family driving close behind. There’s also plenty of potato puns, for example: “I thought I was baked!”
Between the folklore, the food cultures, the damn-the-man and down-with-the-oppressor themes, and the puns, The Luck of the Irish has it all.
There are, of course, many other things that had a hand in my radicalization, especially in regards to food, but this witty, little 86-minute stunner of a film was really where it all started (it helps that I had an devastatingly massive crush on Ryan Merriman who played Kyle). I can’t wait for the sequel and can only hope that Kyle, now a potato chip magnate with a activist soul of gold and inspired by the legacy of Ireland’s fight for reproductive justice, uses his wealth and his access to a network of leprechauns to fight for abortion rights in modern day America. And I hope it still has a lot of potato puns.
Pairs well with:
If you’re looking for more radical Irish food history masterpieces to consume this St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a few additional suggestions:
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, written in 1729 by Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift who was known for two main things in his career 1) being a Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and 2) being cheeky.
Irish Food History: A Companion by Irish scholars Dorothy Cashman and Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire.
Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration by food scholar Hasia R. Diner. The connection with the other cultural groups who immigrated to the United States really helps you understand the complex social situation.
I had never heard of that movie before reading this issue of penknife. Thanks for the heads up about it! Great issue!
I had also never heard of this movie! — and I just wrote a whole piece on Irish food! We need mor 86-minute movies rife with potato puns.