Having grown up in Toronto, unqualified "beef patty" means the Jamaican snack. It is extremely common junk food I would buy at a convenience store on my way home from school.
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Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.
I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular and ordering a 'beef patty' would never get you a burger patty unless you were in a burger joint. Same as in Toronto; asking for patty (or beef patty) will 99% of the time get you a Jamaican patty.
If I got a jamaican beef patty instead of a hamburger beef patty, i think that would be close enough.
But I have serious issues with the term "sweetbreads".
>>Not being from Toronto, never in a million years would I even think of that as a visitor.
>I grew up in another country where Jamaican patties were popular [...]
Have you considered the possibility that Jamaican patties aren't universally popular and the fact that the two of you came from cities with a significant Jamaican diaspora doesn't invalidate the experience of the person who probably came from a city that didn't?
All of that may be true and yet it seems overly prescriptive for a state authority to determine the name of food. After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich. Regional variations on names are quite reasonable. On the other hand, Canadians are a prescriptive culture. In Montreal, for instance, they are very strict about street signs and so on. Perhaps it is just how things are done by that people.
> After all, a cheesesteak is not a steak but a sandwich.
I don't know if you're not seeing the obvious or deliberately ignoring it, but the rather-salient differences between those are that (a) "cheesesteak" being one word rather than two tells you it might be a different thing, and (b) "cheesesteak" (or even "cheese steak" by itself) do not carry a single universal meaning different from the rest. You know, unlike "beef patty", where even Googling it now doesn't show Jamaica in the top result.
If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk". Nobody minds if you sell soymilk or Jamaican beef patties. They're just asking you not to actively hijack terms that carry significantly different meaning to millions/billions of other people. It's not that hard and it's not some sort of totalitarian flex to have rules like this. With HN being what it is, they'd probably call banning that anti-veganism.
or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.
I don't think these kind of language struggles are as minor as you paint them, especially around regulation and law-making.
a well understood and unified spoken language is the keystone to a lot of human endeavor; even if the goal is a region without language barriers the bootstrap process towards that goal is accelerated by a common tongue.
> or, just let people call things what they want, and focus on real problems instead. Even this comment as I’m typing feels like too much time committed to the subject.
If a problem isn't yours that doesn't mean it's fake.
You can simply not waste your time on it, that's not other people's problem. Why should they even care that you're wasting your time? When you clearly don't care about them wasting time or money due to this stuff, you should expect zero sympathy for your own time wastage on the subject. You need to show sympathy before you receive it.
> If you want something to compare against, this is like banning people businesses from calling soymilk just "milk".
Big Dairy got to you, huh.
There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk. If anything, cow’s milk should be clearly labeled as such, if we’re following the approach of identifying ingredients properly.
> Big Dairy got to you, huh.
Common sense did, not Big Dairy.
> There’s nothing wrong with referring to other kinds of milk as milk.
There very much is. For most people, if they go to a shop and ask for milk and get handed goat milk, they will get annoyed. Similarly if they ask for eggs and get handed duck eggs or quail eggs. I don't know why common sense is so lacking on this forum but this is not my opinion, this is a fact.
But yeah, if someone disagrees with you they're just Big Dairy shill. There's no other way a rational person could disagree with another.
How would you define milk?
I’m from New Haven and if you went into a place and asked for a beef patty you would get a Jamaican beef patty, not a burger. It may not be everywhere, but pretty much every city I’ve lived in that is the case
If you ask for a beef patty here, the server will look confused, and then bring you a hamburger patty on a plate
Anecdote: I asked for the "mushroom burger" on their menu at an airport years ago -- I didn't want meat and it had nothing indicting meat in the listed ingredients that I checked -- and they brought me a hamburger beef patty with mushrooms on top. Imagine both of our surprises when they brought me the plate and I was like uhm I think that's another table's order? Well it turns out, at least to that restaurant (idk about the rest of the locality), that was considered a mushroom burger. Elsewhere in the same country (and even Googling it now), a mushroom burger means a vegetarian burger with a portobello mushroom or such as the "patty". Like how a salmon burger means the patty is made of salmon, or a veggie burger means the patty is made of veggies.
I sat there looking dumb and the waiter thought (like everyone here) that I was some idiot who didn't know what a burger was. Now I'm not suggesting they need to regulate what "mushroom burger" means across the locality too, but I couldn't have been the first one to get caught off-guard by this, and the whole incident never needed to happen either. At least in an airport where people from all over stop by, I seriously wouldn't think that only a racist or anti-meatatarian/anti-vegetarian dictatorship would impose some common-sense rules to prevent confusion or food/time wastage arising from cuisine-"unculturedness".
A mushroom burger is a normal order at a takeaway in New Zealand: the usual beef burger, but with added mushroom.
Note that there is often a rather restricted choice for vegetarian or vegan food (unless you pick your place carefully).
If I ordered a mushroom burger (especially as my preferred “mushroom and Swiss burger”), I’d be surprised if it came without the beef patty (the burger part).
It’s not that I can’t understand that the other exists, but my brain is wired to think of mushroom as a topping/adjective and burger as the noun.
I once ordered a vegetarian burger in some kind of trivia bar of a big american city. It came with bacon... When I asked they said: "but nobody ever complained about having bacon in it". there are alternate realities out there. Even in the deepest small town I had never seen that.
I can’t think of many places in the US where “mushroom burger” doesn’t mean a beef burger with mushrooms. Maybe in a vegetation or vegan restaurant.
Now if you asked for a mushroom veggie burger, that would be different.
How many visitors do you think would go to a restaurant intending to order a (hamburger) beef patty? The potential for confusion is overstated.
I think that type of law is usually supposed to protect against, not a surprised restaurant patron (because that's the kind of thing that would fix itself anyway, the customer would send it back and/or not go back) but subtle adulteration of food.
The law says the "patty" has to be nothing but meat and seasoning so that nobody can sell a "beef patty" that looks like a normal patty but actually is 10% sawdust (or more plausibly, some gross but very cheap filler product).
In a well-functioning government, this kind of thing could be worked out - the regulators would realize their rules were too far-reaching and culturally myopic, and that this is clearly not an attempt to sneak adulterated mystery meat past them. They could alter the regulation, like allowing the term "Jamaican Beef Patty" to be used, and that prefix removes the 'no encasement' regulation and allows whatever other common safe ingredients.
But of course, most governments don't function that well. The bureaucrats get deeply invested in enforcing their rules and no one with the authority to change the regulation can even hear the cries of those impacted, let alone change them.
That's not too remote of a possibility given that street foods like currywurst exist, and sausages are theoretically supposed to be sold encased in bread (ie. hot dog) similar to beef patties.
Many people on keto diets do exactly this, as they won't eat bread. I've dined with multiple people who have gone into a restaurant and ordered a beef patty. And until today, I'd never even heard of the Jamaican thingy, which would not be keto-friendly btw.
You might be surprised, I had a similar kind of confusion myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164552
Sorry, but you're just uncultured if you don't know what Jamaican patties are.
This is like saying "never in a million years would I think 'butter chicken' is a red, spicy Indian curry instead of chicken roasted in butter".
Usually, when I travel, it helps me to better understand and respect that other people may have different perspectives or experiences than me. This is probably the first time I'm seeing someone so cultured achieve the exact opposite, so thanks for familiarizing me with that.
P.S. When I search "what is a beef patty" on Google it quotes and links me to Wikipedia [1] which says absolutely nothing about Jamaica. Perhaps consider enlightening Wikipedia if you'd like to make the world a more cultured place.
I lived in São Paulo. A giant metropolis that is home for countless international diasporas. I’ve eaten in Vietnamese, Sirian, Thailandese, Russia, Polish restaurants, never ever found a Jamaican one.
Sorry, you’re just uncultured if you don’t understand that understandings of different “foreign” cultures differ from place to place.
I don’t even agree that the use of the term “beef patty” should be regulated just so you don’t confuse a dumb tourist lol. Getting something you didn’t expect is part of travelling. But YOUR comment is too condescending and hypocritical to NOT draw attention to, and it’s a type of hypocrisy that’s endemic to North America. You tell someone from the US that you don’t know Spanish or some aspect of Mexican culture or something like that and if they’re snooty enough they’ll call you an uncultured trailer park hick or something. Put another 1,000–2,000 km of distance to the cultural reference you’re making and you’ll get blank stares.
I live in a country that’s far further from the Caribbean, where it makes up an insignificant part of our vast multicultural landscape. Don’t act like I’m “uncultured” due to something that you’re much more likely to know about due to your geographic proximity.
1. Jamaican cuisine is fairly popular globally.
2. Patties are popular within Jamaican cuisine.
It's not something very niche. I think my comment was perfectly fair. It's like not knowing what empanadas, samosas, shumai, or takoyaki are (and yes, one would be uncultured for not knowing any of these too). It betrays something about the cosmopolitan-ness of your life experiences.
It's not even about geography. I'm pretty sure a good proportion of even Torontonians don't know about the Jamaican patty, and I'd call them uncultured too.
There's nothing wrong about being uncultured, it's not the end of the world. You can even work to improve it.
If we're going by anecdotes, let's add mine: I've lived in 4 continents, about 15 countries, I speak 6 languages, I hold a few citizenships, I consider myself fairly cultured and not only I've never eaten a Jamaican meat patty but I've also never seen one for sale.
In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985.
How familiar are you with food from the Amazon basin region? I wouldn't consider you uncultured for not knowing much about it, but orders of magnitude more people eat food from the Amazon basin than Jamaican food.
>In fact the only way I know about their existence is through watching news reports of what happened in Canada in 1985.
Since you know about it, the label doesn't apply to you, regardless of how.
That’s not very fair. Can’t pretend for a second they or the many like them haven’t seen news about 1985 Canada?
Alright, buddy :-)
That being said I'll gladly accept Jamaican restaurant recommendations in Taiwan or close to Berlin.
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/2501/
"The average North American probably only knows about Ackee and Saltfish, and Curry Goat!"
"And Oxtail Stew, of course."
"Of course!"
Does one need to know a variety of dishes from each of the 193 UN-recognized states' cuisines to not be uncultured? If not, which ones are OK to be ignorant of? Clearly Jamaica's a must-have, but I'd like the full list so I can remediate the issue at once.
>Does one need to know a variety of dishes from each of the 193 UN-recognized states' cuisines to not be uncultured?
No, but you should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least. That's only about 50-75 dishes; many individual restaurants have bigger menus than that.
>Ackee and Saltfish, and Curry Goat! And Oxtail Stew,
Yes... I would expect one to know these. At least that oxtail stew is a popular Jamaican delicacy.
I'm from Australia where we really don't have any 'national dishes', so we just eat a wide variety of everyone else's dishes. I've never heard of ackee, saltfish, oxtail stew, or Jamaican beef patties. Does that make me uncultured? I'd argue not. Do you know what a schnitty is? Or a sausage sambo? Everyone here does, but I certainly don't expect the rest of the world to know about them because 'of course' they're everywhere and significant.
Everyone's perspective is from their local area, so please don't expect everyone globally to know about your local food, no matter how broadly you think it's known.
> You should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least.
Leaving aside how ridiculous these numbers you pulled out of nowhere are, what godsent culturedness list are you using that is somehow so common knowledge and that yet the rest of us uncultured boneheads somehow missed the memo for? Even searching this now, and no disrespect whatsoever to Jamaica, I neither see "Jamaica" nor even "patty" listed in the top search result for the 100 top cuisines in the world [1]. For reference, they have Russian, Dutch, English, etc. listed, which (again, no disrespect intended) are the ones you often hear people complain/joke about as being bland.
> No, but you should know the top 5 dishes of the 10-15 most popular cuisines of the world, at least. That's only about 50-75 dishes; many individual restaurants have bigger menus than that.
Man, I so don't care about food. I pay attention to it enough that it doesn't hurt me and gives me the nutrients I need.
193? Top five? 10-15? 50-75? I could not care less to have a standard regarding knowledge about cuisines.
I get what food I can from the options I have available to me and use the words on the menu or out of the staff's mouth.
Edit: stick to the point
I think you're vastly overestimating the popularity of Jamaican cuisine. I've never in my life seen a Jamaican restaurant. I've had Jamaican food at a Jamaican friend's house, it was pretty good, but I'd never heard about their beef patties until literally today just reading about them on here. If you live in a part of the world where it's more prominent, good for you, but not everybody does.
You’re asserting that Jamaican is in the top 15?
That’s quite the claim.
Going to school in Jamaica, Queens (ironic, I know) I would get a beef patty from a deli/bodega on a roll with cheese or on cocoa bread (said to be the only way to eat it by random dude hanging out in store who called my cheese order blasphemy) Another specialty is pizza shops carry them and you can get one split open, covered in mozzarella and topped with pepperoni. You'd never think you'd get them in an Italian eatery but there you have it, beef patties. I still get fresh Tower Aisle beef patties from the local C-Town deli from time to time.
coco bread :D
But with cheese and in coco bread are both common, yeah. Most old school Italian pizza places in Manhattan/Queens carry them in my experience. (e.g., Sacco Pizza on 54th & 9th)
Same in Edmonton, the other side of Canada.