The Jamaican Patty in Toronto

Jamaican patties arrived in Toronto with Caribbean immigration in the 1960s and '70s and became one of the city's most ordinary foods — sold at corner stores, bakeries and patty shops across the city, filled with spiced beef, chicken or vegetables in a flaky, curry-yellow pastry. Ordinary enough, in fact, that a 1985 fight over what to call it became a genuine national news story.

The Patty Wars

In February 1985, a federal food inspector, acting under Canada's Meat Inspection Act, served notice to Kensington Patty Palace in Kensington Market that it — and by extension other Jamaican bakeries — could no longer sell its product under the name "patty." The regulatory logic: the Meat Inspection Act's technical definition of a "meat patty" was a flat disc of ground meat and seasoning, like a hamburger patty, with no pastry crust — a definition a filled, dough-wrapped Jamaican patty didn't meet on strictly technical labelling grounds. The shop's manager, Michael Davidson, became the public face of the resistance, and the dispute drew widespread public backlash against the government's position.

The name survived

Public pressure led regulators to back off enforcing the rename, and the name "patty" survived intact. The episode — remembered as the "Patty Wars" — is now treated as a landmark moment in Toronto's Caribbean food history, and the Jamaican patty remains one of the most recognizable foods to have come out of the city's Caribbean community.

Sources

• CBC — The Story of Toronto's Bizarre 1985 "Patty Wars"
• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 — Delicious and Jam-Packed With History