Why I Don’t Wear My Orange Athletic Shoes Today

An homage to the Irish famine.

I have a busy work schedule today and no plans to gadabout. Nobody will see whether or not I’m wearin’ the green.

So why did I put my orange running shoes back in the closet this morning? Even though they are the most comfortable on my aging bunions?

Why is orange an insult to everything Irish, you may ask?

It’s certainly not because they clash on the color wheel.

My heritage came to mind several days ago when Soliel Ho, food editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a piece worrying about whether she was Asian enough for some of her reviews of the restaurants she lauds in her columns.

Apparently, some readers question her creds when she steps outside the lines of her Vietnamese roots to review Latino, Chinese or South Asian restaurants that abound in and around her beat.

As a somewhat backsliding food writer myself, I found this column curious. How different is her experience from my own as a first-generation Irish American growing up in the 1940s Bronx.

Back then, my friends and I certainly boasted of our Irish, Italian, Scottish, and German roots (we had one Spanish family on our block, but heartthrob Steve, though idolized by all the girls, was too old to hang with us kids). We just didn’t want the brogues, burrs, and heavy accents to tarnish our drive for the American dream.

We did everything we could to distance ourselves from our parents’ swooning to John McCormack singing the Irish ditties on the radio Sunday afternoons or the old-fashioned sweaters our aunts in the “ould country” would send as gifts for a birthday.

One thing we held onto as closely as our first communion bouquets was our love of our national food, the potato. And unlike the carefully delineated regional cuisines of today, we all cooked our potatoes the same way, whether our parents hailed from County Cork in the south or up in Donegal in the north: well-biled as my father would say.

Skin on, pot drained and set on a potholder in the middle of the table. Spear one with your fork, peel it over your plate, salt, and eat.

The ubiquitous starch formed my dietary preferences for decades, until I moved out and discovered such delicacies as Worcestershire sauce. Mushrooms and avocados.

Yes, I’d moved to California, and my palate has never been the same. No pots or ketchup bottles in sight.

At some point, I took up cooking and food writing as a profession, and unlike Ms. Ho, students cared only that the food I taught was authentic.

I’d been raised to believe the only real chefs were white men, as were the only people with any real power.

When a loud, bumbling white woman from Boston came along and expanded my cooking and eating repertoire to include French cooking, I have to say, looking back, my choices were still not very adventuresome compared to the ethnic foods available to us now.

But eating escargot, anything with boeuf in the name, and setting a dish on fire certainly meant that yes, Toto, we’re not in the Bronx anymore.

But when I taught Julia Child’s recipes in my cooking classes, or Celia Chiang’s dishes or a German soup, I didn’t have to worry about someone condemning me for cultural appropriation.

So few people outside of The New York Times kitchens or the four-star restaurants knew how to cook this food, that people were just happy to have a resource for learning to make this food.

But what does this have to do with the color Orange?

We make jokes about the Irish and their love of beer and potatoes. When I was learning to become an American in the forties and fifties, I knew nothing about Irish history. That all changed when I decided to write a novel set in the Irish famine and made several trips to the birthplace of my father.

William of Orange, the protestant King of England, defeated the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne outside of Dublin in 1690. I’ve seen him referred to as Billy Orange. His victory established the English protestant hold on Ireland going forward, most effectively during the years 1845–51, when the potato famine ravaged Ireland.

While the potato crops failed across the world, only Ireland starved. Other countries whose peasants depended on the tuber for survival fed their serfs and peasants until the potato came back.

England, however, closed its borders to shipments of food to Ireland while accepting food from Ireland’s tenant farms to feed its own population. During the worst years, England had to post armed guards to accompany the food carts from the tenant farms to the docks that would transport the food to England.

Starving farmers were known to attack the shipments to feed their dying children.

The devastation to Ireland during those five years was unspeakable. Its population shrank to half its size, from approximately six million to three million. It only recovered during the years I wrote my novel over 150 years later.

I think back to my history with food. To the bland meat and potato meals that nourished me growing up. The Irish weren’t known for innovations in the kitchen. Not because they didn’t have the makings of good cooks, but for centuries they were restricted to quarter-acre patches of land upon which they had to grow the only crop that would feed their large families, the potato.

And so they ate potatoes, day in and day out, with a pitcher of buttermilk on the table, together making a staple that kept them bored but healthy.

Those that had the grass of thirty cows, the wealth that kept them alive during the famine, might have cabbage, wild onions, or a chicken to boil. And that was my culinary heritage.

Our diets are linked to our history, our economy, our politics, our culture. You can’t tell from a potato the lyricism in the heart of an Irish poet. The dazzling speed of an Irish dancer. The music in a family’s laugh around an Irish dinner table.

These things came to my mind when I chose my shoes this morning. I don’t know if my father or my aunts and uncles knew much about the battle that crushed the Irish heart yearning for freedom on the River Boyne in 1690.

I know that in 1986 when I visited Ireland with my daughter, we heard about William of Orange with bitterness in the voice of our tour guide.

I have no answers for Ms. Ho in her need to bridge purity in her food columns and freedom to write about her art, her love of food.

I know that people who press for ethnic writers to write about their own roots are acting as guardians of their heritage as much as I am in wearing my black scuffs today, holding off until tomorrow to don my comfy orange running shoes.

I’m hearing the ghosts of my ancestors who might be peeking through my window telling me to wear them tomorrow, on a day when their dayglo color won’t hold any meaning for the millions of faceless Irish souls for whom orange symbolized starvation and cruelty.

They would say, why honor a man who took the potatoes out of our mouths?

They’d remind me of the history I should teach my offspring. That if it weren’t for men like him, they might have ruled their own country when the praties died. We wouldn’t have sent all that good butter and wheat to England like we had to, they’d say. Sure, and we’d have put it in our own mouths instead and bugger bloody Billy Orange.

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