Let's Cool It With Dying Food Green for St. Patrick's Day

This year, St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Saturday, meaning that you can spend the whole day getting wasted without your coworkers judging you for drinking Jameson at your desk. But before you set out to spend the day celebrating a cultural heritage you may have no part of, there’s something important we need to talk about: stop with the green food.

Much like the endless parodies of Black Flag’s logo have become nauseating, the concept of dying things green in celebration of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland has jumped the shark. From pancakes to pints to deviled eggs(!), the madness must stop.

Gaze upon this horror:

The above abomination comes courtesy of Skyline Chili. Not content to ruin a wonderful, hearty food by transforming it into some sort of limp spaghetti sauce, this Cincinnati eatery decided to die those already extraneous noodles a putrid shade of green. The whole thing ends up looking like something out of a 24th century space prison.

Skyline’s gesture isn’t an aberration, but symptomatic of a deeper cultural rot. Not even savory breakfasts are safe, as this sausage egg and cheese suggests. At least they had the restraint to avoid dyeing the eggs green and turning this into a full on Seussian nightmare.

Lest you feel relief that green bagels were confined to Brooklyn, national chain Breugger’s is here to disappoint you.

That’s not even to speak of green beer. Oh lord, the green beer. No alcohol should be green unless it’s absinthe, chartreuse, Four Loko, or nuclear waste spiked with everclear. In other words, green alcohol should be near-fatal in even modest quantities. And yet, green beer is perhaps the hardest of all to avoid. Even those who stick to paler pints will likely see it spewed in bar bathrooms and splattered across city sidewalks by around one in the afternoon, to say nothing of the dye’s more internal side effects.

And don’t think for a second that you can get around this totally-enforceable moratorium on green food by adding green ingredients to foods that don’t need them, either. Nobody wants to try your lime avocado hummus, Cheryl.

Between the Potato Famine, The Troubles, and the blatant Thierry Henry handball that kept Ireland out of the 2010 World Cup, have the Irish not suffered enough? There are plenty of perfectly fine foods like shepherd’s pie, coddle, and corned beef and cabbage to enjoy. To ignore that is to reduce Ireland’s culinary heritage to a color. The beautiful people whose homeland spans from Dingle to Dublin and all the way up to Belfast surely deserve better than that.