'Patty squirrel' is the most Toronto thing you'll see today
It may have been a decade since New York City's viral "pizza rat" made shockwaves online, but its cultural legacy endures, and now Toronto has its own answer to the viral, ravenous rodent.
Sure, we've had a pizza raccoon and a bagel pigeon grace our feeds in Toronto over the years, but if you asked me to paint the most quintessentially Toronto picture I possibly could, it would probably look something like the video shared by comedian Big Norm Alconcel on Instagram on Wednesday, Aug. 12.
In the video, aptly titled "Only in Toronto," Alconcel records a Toronto black squirrel munching away on a Jamaican patty with, fittingly, a Kardinal Offishall song playing, while he narrates: "Y'all ever seen a squirrel with a beef patty before?"
Well, now I have, Big Norm.
Alconcel tells blogTO that the squirrel's snack was actually his doing, explaining that his friend was eating a curry goat patty from Kensington's Golden Patty and was about to throw it away.
"In the midst of that, a pregnant squirrel approached me. I am a squirrel whisperer. They love me," Alconcel says. "So I said, 'Yo, let me have that patty — this pregnant squirrel might want it.'"
And he was right: "She enjoyed the hell out of it."
Alconcel goes on to explain that, despite how quintessentially Toronto the whole ordeal was, it also paints a picture of Canada more broadly.
"It was a squirrel on the Esplanade, eating a Jamaican patty from Kensington that was purchased by a Montrealer, made by Chinese Jamaicans, fed to her by a Filipino from Scarborough," he says. "A true Canadian Heritage Moment."
A true Canadian Heritage Moment, indeed.
