Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/gemsandpatties
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, get a great deal on language - 30% off with only minor stains.
In this episode we’re returning to the theme of renaming, for two food-related renamings: the first one that mostly happened, the second that mostly did not - but in a good way.
Content note: the first part of the episode concerns an ableist slur, so there are incidences of that slur, and discussion of ableism and later anti-Black racism.
Also if you’re involved or have been involved in a renaming project of any kind, then I’d love to hear about it. It’s a topic I plan to keep returning to; get in touch.
On with the show.
HZ: In the UK, there's a fairly common type of sweet - or candy, in US English - that is a kind of medium-firm gummy, in fruitesque flavours and vivid colours, shaped like very small truncated cones or pyramids decorated with little grooves. And in 2022, some retailers started selling these sweets under a new name: Mini Gems. But a lot of manufacturers and vendors still use the sweets' previous name, Midget Gems. And it took Dr Erin Pritchard pointing that ‘midget’ is a slur to get any of them to do anything about it.
ERIN PRITCHARD: I'm Dr Erin Pritchard, I'm actually a Doctor of Human Geography, but I specialise in Geographies of Disability and so now I am a lecturer in disability studies and special educational needs core member of the Centre for Cultural Disability Studies.
HZ: In August 2020, Erin published an article in The Big Issue North, with the title "Why don't we just... stop using the word 'midget'?"
ERIN PRITCHARD: And then I thought, right, let's try and be proactive about it.
HZ: So Erin wrote to the supermarket M&S, which has more than 1,000 stores within the UK as well as around four hundred internationally.
ERIN PRITCHARD: I wrote to M&S and I said, “Look, I don't think you're intending to cause any offence. But this word is a form of hate speech, and not many people know that, because with dwarfism there hasn't been much activism.” And they got back and they said, “Oh, well, you know, we don't mean to cause any offence,” and I go, "okay, fair enough. So you're going to change it then?" "Well, we don't know.” And I go, “Under the Equality Act, this would be a form of hate speech." And so they're like, "Okay, right, we're going to revisit it."
HZ: People saying that they didn't mean to cause offence - it's not much of a defence, is it?
ERIN PRITCHARD: No, no. It's a very outdated term and they might not be fully aware of it, but that's the point. So I thought, well, let's try this because I think it's about time that people knew that word was offensive, and that, like other terms of offence with other minority groups, that they should not be used in the media.
You have to keep pushing and pushing, and I never think it has as much prominence - it's not a popular minority group. Dwarfism as a group, we’re so behind in terms of rights and recognition. But I think with dwarfism, there's a lack of respect because of this minority, and because we're small people, and if you're small, you're lesser than. And it's like, well, anyone can be impacted by this genetic condition. I was born with it, not because of magic or whatever these people seem to think; it's because I've got average-sized parents, and like any other person who's disabled, it can just happen. So I think maybe people need to reflect on that - and that it is just a condition, it's a condition that impacts your spine, your bones, things like that. It's not something that's funny. And that's what I just can't get, people just seem to think that if you're small you're automatically funny. “It's just dwarfs and we all know that they love laughing at themselves.”
There was midget wrestling, I don't know if they've changed it to dwarf wrestling now, but they still refer to it as midget wrestling. And even far back as 2013, Little People of America were saying, look, don't use that term. And they said, it's not offensive. And one of the average sized promoters - or was it one of the midget wrestlers? - said, “Midget wrestling, you know, that gets more attention than say, if we called it little person wrestling.” Yeah, because if we called it little person wrestling, you may be reducing it down to a disabled person. Whereas, you know, ‘midget’ makes it exciting. One of the promoters who was average-sized said, “People think I'm interesting if I'm surrounded by 14 midgets,” and it's like, you must be a very, very boring person then.
HZ: So between the exoticism and the ableism, the word really needed to get gone from supermarket shelves. And Erin contacting M&S did work. It took a while, but in January 2022, M&S started selling the sweets with the name Mini Gems.
ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah, it got changed. To me, Mini Gems just sounds so much more up to date and better.
HZ: A few other retailers soon followed M&S in renaming the sweets Mini Gems, including the supermarket Tesco and the confectionary brand Maynards Bassetts. But even now, nearly two years after M&S rebranded their verson and more than three years since Erin first contacted them about it, change is patchy. Some supermarkets sell packets with Mini Gems printed on them, but their online listing is still for the other name of the product.
ERIN PRITCHARD: I just wanted to get this ball rolling and say, well, look, are you going to do something? And it's only when it got into the media and I got a load of abuse that other sweet companies or supermarkets that said, “Actually, we're going to revisit this now.”
HZ: And, surprise surprise: when you rebrand something so it doesn’t have a slur in its name any more, and there’s a bit of media coverage, promptly, a backlash will arrive.
ERIN PRITCHARD: All of a sudden it became apparent that people are very upset by the sweets they've probably never bothered with before. And if that's what's bothering you, I'm sure there's bigger things in life to be concerned about. We didn't ban the sweets, the sweets haven't been banned, they've just got a different name; they still taste the same, they're still the same texture and everything.
HZ: You hear from a lot of people moaning that, like, Marathon got called Snickers, or Opal Fruits got called Starburst, and just not nearly as much anger about this slur that was on the shelves this whole time.
ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah, that's interesting because it's like, I think because even though this had been changed before any of this kicked off in the media, I think people, they're not aware that ‘midget’ is a very offensive word. They use it probably quite a lot, especially in referring to dwarves in entertainment and stuff, and so now they're being picked up on it. And I don't think a lot of people like being educated by a woman, specifically with dwarfism, because most of the messages I'm getting are off average-sized men saying, “It's not offensive!” And it's like, that's because you've never had it screamed at you in the street. So I don't know why people who it's never impacted are getting so upset and calling others ‘snowflakes’ when they're the ones getting upset by it. I've got a doctorate in this, and I have got dwarfism, but there'll always be an average-sized person whose only recollection of dwarfism is through Snow White, and yet somehow they'll construct themselves as the expert, and tell you it's not offensive or, “No, you've got that wrong.”
HZ: Also by having it on bags of sweets, that's kind of the ultimate “It's okay to say this in normal conversation”.
ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah. But you do get through to some people, some people go, “I never realised that. I never knew that.” And so it's in the conscious then. That's what I think is important, to try and raise awareness through sort of other media outlets.
HZ: There are a lot of other things still that use the word. It's in other brands, it's in botanical terms and stuff. Are you having any luck getting them to change? Or - this is not your job, you have a job.
ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah, the things that are no longer in production, say like Midget cars, you know, the MG Midget, I don't care, they're history. And I don't need you to change things in history like that. So I'm not saying that everybody has to go and put their MG Midget on the scrap heap. But for things that are constantly in production, like the sweets, those are the kind of things I do think need to be changed. If there is a reason to use it in that, well, can we just find a more up to date, enlightened term?
HZ: Is there ever an appropriate usage of this word?
ERIN PRITCHARD: I'd say the only time you could use it is if you're an academic and referring back to the freak shows, because that's what they referred to in freak shows were midgets, that's where it was popularized. So I think in an academic sense or historical sense, yes, it's acceptable to use that term then, but to note that it is offensive and it should not be used in modern day terms.
HZ: Where did the term come from? You mentioned the freak shows.
ERIN PRITCHARD: Yeah. So it is popularized there, but it originates from the word ‘midge’, meaning the sandfly or gnat, you know, those pesky little flies. So you’re dehumanizing people with dwarfism when you're using that. There's no medical connotations. You know, the medical term for my disability is achondroplasia. It's a form of dwarfism, or skeletal dysplasia. ‘Midget’ has none of that. It was just this entertainment word that comes from an insect. And you see a lot of the entertainment involving people with dwarfism is very dehumanizing, such as to be picked up and thrown across a room.
But you know if you take it out the media - and you take it out of, in this case, a tangible object - you're slowly going to just take that word out; it’s no longer going to be a normal word, it's no longer going to be popular. So people aren't going to slip up. If that word hadn't been used in the media and had died away with the freak show, people would never use it, very rarely would they be using it. So I'm hoping that years to come, that's going to be the case.
CHRIS STRIKES: We only ever hear about the worst cases of racism and discrimination and these types of things, but we never see the smaller steps of how we get there. But it comes from the same energy of othering, and devaluing a person's culture, or devaluing a person who they are because of their culture. The worst extreme of it can end up being violent. But if we nip it in the bud early, with these sort of small microaggressions, hopefully we don't get to places where they play out in their most violent and extreme form.
The core of Patty Vs Patty is essentially systemic racism, even though it's ridiculous, it's satirical, it's comedic, all these things that kind of make light of the situation.
HZ: Patty Vs Patty is a short documentary about Toronto's Patty Wars of 1985.
CHRIS STRIKES: I'm Chris Strikes. I am the director and founder of a production company called Callowgrove Entertainment. and I am the director, writer, and one of the producers of Patty Vs Patty.
HZ: When we talk about patties in this interview, let's just clarify what we mean by ‘patty’: we mean the Jamaican patty, the semicircular pastries wrapped around a savoury filling.
CHRIS STRIKES: That's correct.
HZ: It’s important.
CHRIS STRIKES: I have never heard it referred to as a semicircle, but I suppose it is, but that's funny. I've never heard it referred to as that, but it is a semicircle patty.
HZ: The Patty Wars erupted in early 1985, waged by the enforcers of the federal government's Meat Inspection Act against vendors in Toronto of the aforementioned Jamaican patties.
CHRIS STRIKES: On the one side, you have Jamaican patty vendors who have been selling patties from Jamaica for a long, long time. Especially since so many Jamaicans immigrated into Canada, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, and you had Jamaicans from even before that. So that's one side of it. And then the other side of it was the food inspectors who represented the federal government of Canada and the food agency, Consumer and Corporate Affairs, for some reason felt that they needed to intervene, if you will, on a food that had been already sold in Canada regularly for at least 20 to 30 years at that point in time, probably longer, but safely to say at least 30 years at that time.
HZ: The Canadian government tried to ban patty vendors from using the term ‘patty’, because the Meat Inspection Act defined a patty as being made only of minced beef and seasonings.
CHRIS STRIKES: A patty was legally defined as essentially what is hamburger meat, and nothing else. The Jamaican patty has filling, it has crust, flaky crust around it, and it has spices and these types of things. So it consists of ingredients that are not legally defined in Canadian law as what a patty is. And so that was the sort of core of the issue. Because of that, the inspectors ordered that Jamaican patty vendors had to change the name of the patty, otherwise they would be fined, at the time, $5,000, which equals about $12,000 Canadian dollars in money today.
HZ: The government inspectors had some ideas for alternative names that patty vendors could use for patties.
CHRIS STRIKES: ‘Handheld pockets’... ‘Turnover’... ‘Meat pocket’...
HZ: That sounds rude. Sounds like a euphemism.
CHRIS STRIKES: Right? They suggested quite ridiculous names that didn't really resonate with Jamaican culture and Jamaican community. Plus, too, the names themselves, as much as they were ridiculous, they were just a lot longer. Like, patty is just a nice, clean, short word, five letters. But handheld pockets and turnovers: it's more letters - it's just more letters, more syllables, it doesn't roll off the tongue well.
HZ: In law, precedent is really important, and ‘patty’ has hundreds of years of precedent of meaning, in English, a small pie, and not a flat beef mince puck. So it's the burger patty that is the interloper, and the Federal Meat Inspection Act definition of patty is wrong.
CHRIS STRIKES: Exactly. Exactly. But, you know. When you're the government, you can make your own rules.
HZ: That is true. It's not based on merit or etymology.
CHRIS STRIKES: I've never really been able to prove this, but there was speculation that some of the bigger fast food chains - you know, the typical ones that you can think of without naming names - that they might have had something to do behind it, because they had their own products that really stressed on the word ‘patty’. At the time there were whispers in the community that any of those big franchises could have been behind it in lobbying the government to enforce this - because, as I mentioned before, Jamaican patties were sold in Canada and in Toronto for a long time before this, with nobody saying anything about it, nobody caring, nothing, until this moment, where all of a sudden it became an issue. It's not like they just brought it here and they said, “Hey, you can't sell this food by this name that you just brought here.” That wasn't the scenario.
HZ: Have they just targeted patties because they perceive that to be foreign? Like, hamburger is also foreign, it's just white-coded foreign.
CHRIS STRIKES: Exactly. Exactly. And again, like nobody's trying to steal the name hamburger. So like, why don't you just call it a hamburger? Unless if - because with legal terms, legal terms can be very, very tricky, they might argue that a hamburger is the whole sandwich: the hamburger is the patty plus the buns and anything else that's in it. Whereas just the meat part of it, you can't call that a hamburger because it's incomplete. So legal terms can get tricky like that.
HZ: Well, then they could go with my suggestion of ‘meat puck’.
CHRIS STRIKES: I like that. I think that will work in Canada. I don't know about the US though.
HZ: I don't want to anger ice hockey aficionados by taking ‘puck’.
CHRIS STRIKES: No, it's okay. I like hockey and if we call it a meat puck, I think that'd be kind of funny.
HZ: All right. That's good enough for me.
CHRIS STRIKES: That might be too close to another four letter word that you probably don't want kids to be saying by accident or pretending like they're saying it by accident.
HZ: Well, we can't preserve them from everything forever.
CHRIS STRIKES: That is true.
HZ: Go back in the Allusionist vaults to the episode called F'ood - spelled with an apostrophe - which is about some other legal mayhem in Canadian food terminology pertaining to plant-based versions of foodstuffs more commonly made with animal products, and in that episode we recount the etymological journey that burgers made from Hamburg in Germany, hence the crushing disappointment if you ever expected your hamburger to contain ham.
CHRIS STRIKES: If we really want to get technical, a burger technically is just beef. So that means a chicken burger, a fish burger, a turkey burger, those all shouldn't have the name burger as well on it too. If we're really going to get technical about it. But people like to conveniently forget or just not know about that. If you want to call something a vegan patty or a vegan burger, vegan this, vegan that, you're not tricking anybody. Nobody's getting confused. Just relax.
HZ: There have been recent schemes by lawmakers to compel veggie burgers to be called ‘vegetarian discs’ - clearly there's a lot of anxiety about hoarding words to describe beefburgers and only BEEFburgers. But I haven’t seen any such palava over, say, the word ‘tea’ only applying to infusions of the tea plant rather than any old leaf dunked in water. And where’s all the whining about apple butter not issuing forth from the udders of a cow?
CHRIS STRIKES: Yeah. It's interesting to see what people fuss over.
HZ: It’s early 1985, and patty vendors across Toronto are being visited by government inspectors and facing these fines if they didn't do this thing they didn't want to do.
CHRIS STRIKES: They did the best thing that community could do and got media attention around it. And it was one of those things where I think at the time when the government tried to - or the food inspectors, when they tried to enforce this, I don't think they anticipated how big of an issue it was going to be. But it ended up turning into a pretty big issue because of the media coverage, and because, at the time, the Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney just so happened to be going to Jamaica for a conference. So news of what was going on in Toronto reached to Jamaica, because there’s such a huge Jamaican diaspora community here in Toronto, so the news reached back to Jamaica and was in the newspapers there.
HZ: Also in Jamaica at that time were Raymond and Pat Davidson. In the 1970s they had moved from Jamaica to Toronto and opened a bakery, the Kensington Patty Palace, which sold, you guessed, it, patties. While they were on their visit back to Jamaica, they had left their business in the care of their 21-year-old son Michael - who now found himself at the epicentre of the Patty Wars.
CHRIS STRIKES: Michael was the forefront person in the media; the other vendors didn't want to get involved or didn't want to be in the media for fear of reprisal or for whatever other reason. At the time too, Michael was the youngest one, because really, he was managing the business for his parents. So at the time he was 21 years old. Meanwhile, the other patty vendors, they're older and they probably have like, you know, families and mortgages and more to lose. Whereas, you know, when you're 21-year-old kid, you're gonna speak up more. You likely don't have a mortgage at that point in time, and you likely don't have kids at that point in time, so you may feel like you don't have anything to lose. Even though you are representing your parents business, but you'll be more inclined to speak and to speak openly and candidly about an issue that affects you.
HZ: Yeah, what if he got in trouble with his parents? What if they grounded him?
CHRIS STRIKES: From the sounds of it, he kind of did get a bit of a scolding from his parents after this. As I mentioned, the news had reached Jamaica, and his parents were in Jamaica at the time, and so his parents found out from reading the Jamaican newspaper and seeing him - seeing Michael, their son - in the Jamaican newspaper, like, what the hell is going on over there? So there was a little bit of a scolding, but I think Michael is charming enough where he could calm the situation down and make sure that he doesn't get the blame for something that he probably really shouldn't be blamed for anyways.
HZ: And he saved them thousands of dollars.
CHRIS STRIKES: Exactly. Exactly. Saved the business, essentially, and saved the name. His business was called Kensington Patty Palace, and they had signage, they had boxes, they had packaging that had the name on it. So if they had to change the name of the food, that means they have to change the name of the business. And if they change the name of the business, they have to change all the packaging and the marketing and all that stuff, which would have cost $10,000 at the time anyway. So it kind of put a lot of vendors in a rock and a hard spot, where it's very expensive and potentially business-ending to change the name, and also very expensive and potentially business-ending to be fined for not changing the name.
HZ: However! Michael Davidson and his family did not end up having to rebrand their Kensington Patty Palace as Kensington Portable Pie-like Pocket Palace, and the other patty providers of Toronto did not have to rebrand their patties as handheld pastry-enrobed meat chambers. But why?? But how?!
CHRIS STRIKES: Because at the time Brian Mulroney was going to Jamaica, he didn't want to distract, I guess, from the reason why he was going there. And also didn't want to be mocked while he was there. So he appointed a gentleman named Lloyd Perry to help find a resolution, because he was a very well known and well reputable community liaison, particularly with the Black community here in Toronto and with government - at the time he was a guardian of Ontario. So he got involved, and the Jamaican consulate general to Toronto got involved as well, where they sought to find a solution for the vendors, a favorable solution for the vendors, whereby a meeting was held that is funnily known as the Patty Summit.
HZ: The historic Patty Summit of 19 February 1985 -
CHRIS STRIKES: - was held with Consumer and Corporate Affairs and the food inspectors, as well as Michael Davidson, Lloyd Perry and the Consulate General, Oswald Murray at the time. After a bit of back and forth, it was suggested that maybe you can just settle at calling it a Jamaican patty. That was a solution that was widely and happily accepted by everybody ,and by the vendors as well too. So that was the compromise that they came to, whereby businesses wouldn't have to change their name or their packaging or anything like that; they would just have to specify it as a Jamaican patty. And it's funny because Jamaicans who have come to Toronto after 1985 - because when they come here and they see it, they see a patty called specifically a Jamaican patty, and they see this film, they're like, “Oh, is that why patties are called Jamaican patties here?” And I'm like, “Yeah, that's exactly why.” And they're like, “Oh, I never knew that!” Because in Jamaica, you don't call a Jamaican patty a Jamaican patty; you just call it a patty.
HZ: English muffins in England, they're just muffins.
CHRIS STRIKES: Exactly.
HZ: (But so are the other kinds of muffins.) And February 23rd, Patty Armistice Day, is Toronto's annual Patty Day - what happens on Patty Day? Do people pin a patty to their lapel and sing special hymns?
CHRIS STRIKES: I mean, that would be funny if we did; maybe we should make more of a spectacle out of it and have some of these more ornamental things around it. But, essentially Patty Day in Toronto is just a retelling and remembering of this story of the Patty Wars. And as well, too, it's a motivation for people to go and buy and enjoy patties, and argue the endless argument of who makes the best patties in the city. It can turn into a heated argument.
HZ: The Patty Civil Wars.
CHRIS STRIKES: Yeah, a heated, friendly argument. If you grew up in the west end of the city in Etobicoke, where I grew up, you tend to say like, “Yeah, Islington station has great patties!” Or if you grew up in the east end in Scarborough, people will say “Warden station has has better patties!” But the funny thing is, is that both those stations are supplied by the same patty manufacturer. It's just funny to see people arguing over which one is better when they're pointing the same one. And at that point in time, I think it's just which one has the most subway dust on it that influences the taste.
HZ: The Davidson family no longer have their patty shop; they have a patty factory, selling patties wholesale internationally - including to vendors in the Caribbean. Another thing that has changed since the Patty Wars is the law that precipated the conflict.
CHRIS STRIKES: The law that specifically defined patty as only hamburger meat: that actually got expanded too, whereby the definition also covered Jamaican patties. And not just specifically Jamaican patties, because there are other countries that have similar patties to Jamaican patties, and they're slightly different - and some of them are actually full circle. That's why when you said half circle, it made me laugh because I'd never thought of it like that, but it is like a legitimate thing to describe it as
HZ: They could have just written the law in the first place so it specified ‘hamburger patty’, and saved all this mess.
CHRIS STRIKES: They could have, but I don't even think they even were all that privy to Jamaican patties. Because even still today, people who are not particularly exposed to Jamaican culture and Jamaican food, if I ask them like, “What's a patty?” their answer will be hamburger meat, right? There's still a lot of people that are not really familiar with a Jamaican patty.
HZ: I feel sad for them.
CHRIS STRIKES: Right? They're missing out.
HZ: You can watch Chris Strikes’s very charming doc Patty Vs Patty on YouTube or the CBC - and if you happen to be an Academy voter, it is for your consideration in the live action short documentary category. Chris’s documentary Becoming A Queen, about Toronto’s nine time carnival queen Joella Crichton, is available on demand.
And you heard from Dr Erin Pritchard, Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University; her books include Dwarfism, Spatiality and Disabling Experiences, and Midgetism: The Exploitation and Discrimination of People with Dwarfism. I’ll link to Erin and Chris’s work at theallusionist.org/gemsandpatties.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
yaw, verb (of a moving ship or aircraft): twist or oscillate about a vertical axis. Noun: twisting or oscillation of a moving ship or aircraft about a vertical axis.
Try using ‘yaw’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. The Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick of the podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song. Hear his music at PaleBirdMusic.com.
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