In 2007, a fictional potato ran for office in Ireland.
His name was Mr. Tayto. He wore a red suit, a cap, and a smile. He released an autobiography, ran satirical ads, and went on “campaign” across the country. Voters spoiled their ballots writing his name. It was a joke, of course, but also a deeply Irish one. Only in Ireland could a man-shaped potato who acts as a crisp mascot become a national hero.
It’s a stereotype that the Irish are obsessed with potatoes, but unlike many others this one is true. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom carries a potato as a protective charm. It’s described as “an heirloom, a talisman against the evil eye.” There are Reddit threads about how obsessed individual Irish people are with potatoes that has riddled with comments of people relating. There are op-eds about how much we love spuds in local newspapers; and journalists confessing their love for them in national ones. Quora has been trying to understand why we’re so obsessed with prataí for over seven years.
The grá for the potato is older than Ireland as a republic and more beloved than the harp. Like a good pop star cycling through eras the potato reinvents its role in Irish culture when it needs to, shifting from sustenance to national trauma to meme, icon, and comfort food. Each iteration resonates with generations of Irish people passing the potato obsession torch on and on.
Today is National Potato Day, and in celebration, So we thought we’d dive in and see what has made potato Stans of a whole nation?
Let’s start with the facts. The potato arrived in Ireland in the late 1500s and spread like wildfire. Cheap, hearty, and well suited to our wet fields. By the 1840s, it was the cornerstone of the Irish diet. Then came the blight. (While there are valid arguments about colonialism man-making the famine, this is an article about the potato so I’mma stay in that lane).
The blight beggat The Great Famine. It wiped out almost the whole potato crop, and over a Irish million people died or fled. It’s a national scar, and it changed everything. Because of this, blight, in Irish memory, the potato is both the thing that kept us alive and the thing that failed us when we needed it most. It also led to the casual use of the word blight as something ‘that ruins’ a good thing.
All of this makes our national obsession more than a little complicated.
The potato became a symbol of survival and identity. It was the hand that fed and that taketh away. It was what unified families and why they lost each other. Today the potato is all that and more. It’s dinner. It’s continuity. It’s ancestral. It’s folk trauma in carbohydrate form.
According to some sources Ireland has over 90 words for potato. Others say there’s 72. More again go for the more conservative estimate of 50. Any way you peel it the more words a place has for a thing, usually the more important it is to a culture. Like rise in Asia, or pasta in Italy potatoes are deeply personal to whoever cooks them.
In parts of the country still a meal might include three types of potatoes with no irony. Every Irish person knows at least one granny who served mash, roasties, and chips on the same plate. It’s nostalgia or satire, depending on who you ask and what day it is.
Speaking hyperbolically, everyone in Ireland thinks their Ma makes the best mash/roasties. They think their local chipper does the best single of chips. That shows how ubiquitous they are in our society. There are so many pretenders to the throne that for their to be a winner, someone would have to dedicate their life to tasting and ranking them all.
We put potatoes in everything. You’d be hard pressed to find any traditional or modern Irish meal that doesn’t feature potatoes in some way shape or form. They’re in fish pie, shepherd’s pie, beef and Guinness pie, stew, they’re the man event in a carvery. We’ve turned them into breakfast, lunch, dinner, even bread. Our best smashburgers, made by Dash Burger, feature a potato bun.
Then there’s coddle, the greyish, sausage-and-potato stew famously hard to photograph and harder to explain. But for Dubliners, it’s a taste of home. One internet user once said, “I love coddle… it’s the only food I can eat without chewing.” Was that a compliment? The jury is still out on that but it’s part of the canon.
Irish Michelin-starred restaurants have even gotten in on it. Some have served heritage potato varieties with solemn reverence, like wine people naming grapes. We even have articles written about where Michelin approved chefs go to get their chips on their time off. In Ireland there is a real sense that if you mess up the potatoes, you’ve failed. That is the definition of obsession.
The potato has even been a way we as a people have created a more cosmopolitan culture. We as a people are fertile ground in the evolution of the potato. Classic chipper slang, a “one and one” for fish and chips, is second language in the capital after the first chipper in Ireland was opened in the city. The spice bag, a Dublin chipper-born potato dish of salt-and-chilli fries and crispy chicken, is a recent cult classic. It’s fusion, but the potato is still the support structure. We are so obsessed with potatoes that we can’t even have Asian food without them.
Potatoes in art are used to represent hunger, hardship, and heritage. Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters depicts a peasant family’s harsh, earthy meal, symbolising labour and poverty. In Ireland however they straddle the line between maudlin and whimsical. Dublin-based artist Eoin Mac Lochlainn painted a series of potatoes in watercolour for a Bloomsday exhibit. Each spud stood in for memory surviving.
Mr. Tayto is the icon of the potato world. He is beloved. He is branded. He has merch, theme parks, and lore. Like all great icons, Mr. Tayto sits in the uncanny space between marketing gimmick and national mascot. He’s the potato as pop art.
Another artist, Alexis Bannerman, painted Mr. Tayto into the Mona Lisa, Rodin’s The Thinker, and The Scream. “It makes me laugh so much when I’m deciding on a piece,” she told the Irish Times in 2021. Irish potato art is never just serious. It’s always both reverent and ridiculous. It’s hard to mourn and laugh at a vegetable, but we manage.
Food has always been used in fashion and to convey success. Think of all those pineapple paintings. Potatoes are no different. The spud’s cultural journey even stretches back to Shakespeare; Falstaff cries “Let the sky rain potatoes!” in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The ‘let them eat cake’ Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XV, made potatoes a fashion statement when she started wearing potato blossoms in her hair. Sir Francis Drake, who allegedly introduced the crop to Europe and was once immortalised in Germany with a statue holding potatoes.
Since then the obsession with the potato has turned it into a surprisingly prolific pop culture icon of entertainment. In anime, Death Note delivered one of the most memed moments in the genre’s history when Light Yagami declares “I’ll take a potato chip… and EAT IT!” while secretly writing in his Death Note. In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Samwise Gamgee’s enthusiastic lecture on “po-tay-toes” (“boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew”) became an instantly quotable internet meme.
God’s green internet also loves to play with potatoes. The parody site Uncyclopedia embraces the potato as emblem: its logo is a potato-globe, riffing on Wikipedia’s, and claiming to symbolise “mental softness and dead Irishmen.” There are potato songs and potato remixes. All of these infiltrate the Irish relationship with potatoes and become woven more deeply into our cultural fabric.
Potatoes pop up in every kind of Irish storytelling. In Father Ted, a folk singer rants about the Church hoarding potatoes during the Famine. It’s an absurd line and yet it works, because everyone watching knows the colonial connotations at play there. Spuds are high stakes in Irish cultural memory.
In Joyce, they’re talismans. In sitcoms, they’re punchlines. On TikTok, potatoes are high performing content. Put a few spuds covered in butter (Kerrygod or death) and you know that video is going to go stratospheric.
Twitter, Reddit, Instagram they’re full of spud content. You can find Irish TikTokers ironically begging people to stop sending them potato memes… while on another day lovingly reviewing chips from different counties. One viral tweet recently described mashed potatoes as “Irish guacamole.” These memes are all in good spudly fun.
Potato memes dominate cross platform. The line between Irish historical memory and Irish shitposting is thin. Our potato memes are dark, but funny. They skew both historical and surreal. In fact there are so many that TikTokker Garron Noone has a YouTube video ranking them.
When we’re not joking, we’re genuinely sharing potato recipes with pride. There’s a yearly PR blitz around National Potato Day (today) recipes, rankings, debates over the perfect chip. We ask children what their favourite way to eat potatoes is, knowing they they will be answering that question for th rest of their lives. We canvas people on the street about roastie superiority.
All of these things will have Irish eyeballs glued to them because in our land we can tell a lot about a person by what their favourite vehicle for potatoes is. We can categorise strangers based on their choice of russet or rooster. Mash or boiled. Roast or chips. But this isn’t a mean thing. It’s an Irish thing. Only a person who grew up culturally Irish surrounded by people obsessed with potatoes will know that a person who picks mash as their favourite potato probably still drinks pints of milk. They won’t know why they know that, but they do. They know it in their heart.
Cooking potatoes for people is a kind of love language. While this was popularised by American Nora Ephron in the opening refrain in her semil novel Heartburn, Irish mammies would lay claim to it. Heaping spuds on plates has been a way for families to communicate love in a country that hasn’t traditionally been big on talking about their feelings for generations.
The Irish obsession with potatoes is partly ancestral memory and partly cultural in-joke. It’s survival food, comfort food, meme fodder, and political commentary. It’s something we hold grief in. And pride. And gravy.
Potatoes are universally understood. They also represent colonisation, famine, diaspora, and survival. But they’re also Friday night chipper runs, your ma’s roasties, the best part of Christmas. They’re endlessly versatile. They’re funny. They’re tragic. They’re us.
