By TANYA BATSON, Staff ReporterRECENTLY THERE WAS an article in The Food section of The Gleaner lamenting the high cost of patties today. As such, I thought I had to write something to defend the patty because I believe it was being unfairly maligned.
I believe you should defend those who have been there for you, and the patty has been there for me many times. The patty and I have come a long way. My earliest patty memories are of me waiting anxiously for my grandmother to come from the market on a Saturday when my aunts and uncle (who were not that much older), and my brother and I, would get to indulge in the consumption of the patties she had brought. At that time, I had to share my patty.
So, it was with great joy that I finally graduated to the stage where I could buy my own patty. Of course, since then I've had some very bad patty run ins. One of them consisted of my entire primary school life where we were subjected to the worst cornmeal patties (to this day I do not know what was in them but it was not meat) in the world.
Many fond memories involved blowing steam from a hot patty or flashing and licking hot beef from a wayward finger. Let's face it, hot patty eating is not for the uninitiated. One must learn exactly how to get the patty to cool without making the steam burn you, and the exact temperature where it is hot enough but not too hot, when it is just right for eating.
Wonderful thing
Of course, if you can't wait until it cools enough, you must know how to move the piece of patty around your mouth so that the meat does not scorch any single area of the tongue.
The patty is a wonderful thing, and it has come a long way from when it was just beef and crust. Now there is every kind of patty you can think of. You can get it with cheese, with cheese and veg, lobster patties, chicken patties, veggi patties, heck, they now even have brown stewed chicken patties.
Cheap meal
Of course, patty prices aren't what they used to be, but what is? To paraphrase Shabba: everyting a raise up, weh dem ago do, dem affi raise di price of di patty to. Despite the price increases, the patty is probably the only fast food under $100. Look at any of the other fast food joints, burger meals go for $160 and up, as do chicken meals. Indeed, some of these places now cost the same as a casual dining restaurant, which is simply ridiculous. Sorry, but fast food is not fine dining.
With the creation of those new patty meals, which I like to call the ghetto burger, I get most of what a burger gives me. You get your beef, you get your cheese, you get your veg - all on a flaky crust. It's great.
At one point I used to work in New Kingston and would therefore visit the cholesterol strip for lunch. I realized then that without knowing the date one could tell the time of the month by the length of the Tastee patty line.
At the beginning of the month, the patty shop has a decent crowd as people have money and with that, choices.
As the month passes, the lunch hour crowd gets larger. By the end of the month when no one has money it is quite packed.
But maybe rather than a reflection of the patty industry, we should note that it is a crying shame if cost of living has gotten so high that poor people can't afford a patty.
