Laura Kennedy: ‘On the supermarket shelf, Mr Tayto felt as relatable as any other Irish immigrant in a new country. Out of place’

They had a Tayto sale at my local Australian supermarket. There are days when you feel homesick as an Irish emigrant in Australia, and a Tayto sale certainly doesn’t help. It’s a counterintuitive state of reality to be faced with on a Wednesday morning when you’re running in for milk and toilet roll as you complete what my granny called your “messages”.
While perusing supermarkets around the world is always a fun hobby, your local quickly becomes mundane, even when you can buy an obscenely perfect avocado for about €1.20 and the citrus and tropical fruit section looks fantastically different. Even if it takes you a month to realise that some vegetables have different names and it causes bafflement in the self-service aisle.
A red pepper is called a capsicum here, apparently.
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Unlike Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s capital – Canberra – does not have a significant Irish population. There is a substantial Chinese community, so you can easily lose time in the supermarket perusing various delicious foods not easily found at home. The ancestral Italian community is well established, so the pasta aisle won’t let you down, despite the distance from Europe.
But part of the joy of living on the other side of the world is discovering new foods and cultures, so I’m happy to simply make the most of what I find when I head in to browse.
I don’t expect Australia to be like Ireland – though there is a lot of cultural overlap – and even when I miss home, I try to appreciate the differences and immerse in my new country. I can get Barry’s Tea here and that’s really the only non-negotiable, so I’m happy enough.
Yet, a sale on individual bags of Tayto is bit like having a sale on oxygen or chocolate – against nature and just another sign of the unhinged times we live in, when up is down and unprecedented historic events pepper each week like it’s entirely normal. We all know that a supermarket puts unloved products on sale as they stagger limply toward their sell-by date.
Sometimes, you can get a good deal in the reject aisle, but a lot of the time it’s the slightly tragic foods you probably didn’t want anyway. You see them, pallid, moribund and sweating, in fridges and on shelves, the yellow sticker of shame declaring that demand for weirdly flavoured sausages or plastic-looking cheesy garlic bread or dust-flavoured protein yoghurt just wasn’t as predicted this week.
They sit there like St Patrick’s Day shamrock hats in April and Valentine’s Day cards in March – unsold, unappealing, irrelevant.
When I saw a Tayto display in my local supermarket at all, I was shocked. Generally, Irish foods are subsumed under the “UK” shelf label here. They display Barry’s Tea next to Bovril and you just have to accept that, this far from home, people don’t really get the nuances and that’s fine. But seeing a wall of Taytos more than 17,000km from home brought back how I felt seeing Willy O’Dea walking around Limerick all through my childhood, or as though I’d suddenly happened upon Michael D slicing ham behind the deli counter. Just not quite what you’d expect.
At first, the Tayto display felt like an unanticipated embrace from home. On closer inspection, I realised what was up.
This wasn’t a diplomatic triumph of Irishness on the international stage. It wasn’t a corporate crisp war or some sort of Tayto takeover of the Australian market. It was Ireland’s primary export (after Kerrygold and Botox) being offloaded because the sell-by date was rapidly approaching and not enough people here recognise or appreciate the hypnotic bang of onion that emanates from an open bag of the crisps I grew up on. They had yellow-stickered national treasure Mr Tayto himself – the creative mind behind Meanies and pairing a pinstripe trouser with a freshly pressed red jacket, and there he sat, formally attired, rejected, humiliated.
A sort of tragic, carbohydrate-rich Humpty-Dumpty figure.
Naturally, I bought 19 bags as an act of patriotism and now have to figure out how to eat them all within two weeks, after which point they’ll go off. Each time I open the kitchen cupboard I’m met by the slightly shark-like black button stare of Mr Tayto, abandoned and disrespected on this continent so very far from home. I prefer the salt and vinegar flavour myself, but it feels as though it would be rude or possibly treasonous to admit that under the circumstances.
It is interesting that, as an emigrant, your culture is often both enriched and flattened by the distance from home. You gain a tolerance for and appreciation of Irishness that is usually less actively nurtured at home, in part because we necessarily take for granted what is always immediately accessible to us. Also because it is fashionable among those who want to seem worldly to be a bit disdainful of where they come from – its colloquialisms and provincialisms and localisms.
As someone who lives abroad, you can engage guiltlessly in these elements of Irish culture while people at home mutter about how there’s more to us than this. Seeing a bag of Tayto in an unexpected location evokes all sorts of memories from childhood, but then, on the other hand, you can become so hungry for connection to home that you reduce your own culture to 19 bags of crisps and feel a tiny hurt witnessing something so beloved where you come from being so overlooked outside of its natural context.
On the supermarket shelf here in Canberra, Mr Tayto felt as relatable as any other Irish immigrant in a new country. Out of place. Not entirely translating into his new cultural context. A bit foreign and yet to figure out his place.
We’ve all been there.