The Kosher truck
I couldn’t tell you when my family started observing the laws of Kashrut, but we can safely say that it was many, many generations ago. When we stopped keeping Kosher is easier to track.
My great-grandparents Abe and Mina were born in New York in 1912, and 1911, respectively, the children of immigrants from Ukraine. When their parents moved here, the food system they found themselves inscribed within proved wildly different from the one they knew in the Old Country. Kashrut was perhaps the only part of their diet that remained the same. Even then, observing Kashrut took on a different dimension in the new world. Gone were the days of knowing the schecter (the religious official who is trained to kill animals) that helped them put meat on their table in their old shtetl lives.
Papa Abe and Grandma Mina graduated high school at the height of the Depression. When they married they were very young and very poor. They struggled to have enough food to eat. Food is at the center of each of the stories they told my father about that period of their lives. Still they kept Kosher, buying meat only from the Kosher butcher at a significantly higher price in their small town in New Jersey. Like many first-generation Jews, they had assimilated and lived largely secular lives in a world that did not abide by the Jewish calendar that governed the shtetls their parents had grown up in. Still, not keeping Kosher was unthinkable in some ways – their adherence to Kashrut was almost non-religious in this way, a belief stemming from something beyond a fear of God.
My father recounts a story Papa Abe told him when he was young: it was a hot summer day, and upon finding nothing to eat in the kitchen, Abe and Mina set out to find food for the weekend. They left for the Kosher butcher to pick up some chicken before heading to the neighborhood goyishe grocer to pick up produce, where they noticed, much to their surprise, the very same truck they had seen earlier that morning at the Kosher butcher’s shop. In the back of the truck was a young boy throwing slabs of packaged meat to his coworker standing beside the lip of the truck. Mina and Abe felt angry and they felt sad. They thought to themselves: we have been paying 50 percent more for the exact same meat!
That moment was a turning point for them. They gave up on the laws of Kashrut, not just the prohibition against non-Kosher meat, but all of it – the prohibitions against eating milk and meat together, against certain “unclean” animals, the keeping of separate utensils and cookware for Passover, all of it, all at once.
When he first heard this story as a young adult, my father was shocked by their cynicism. Could it not have been that Kosher meat was kept on one side and treife meat on the other? How could they be so sure? He held onto this hope that the truck was split down the middle for years, letting himself believe that this was a world that respected the old Jewish traditions while he began to take on a strict adherence to the laws of Kashrut in his early twenties. About a decade into his new Kashrut observance, an expose was published in the Times that dived deep into the corruption of the Kosher meat industry in New York City during the Depression. None of it had been Kosher. My great-grandparents’ skepticism had been vindicated.
Pork Chops
Like the other members of that generation in our family, my father’s father, Michael, was raised by parents who had cast off the Orthodox identities they had grown up with. Even as the role faith played in their lives began to dwindle, they held onto their observance of the laws of Kashrut, which I have to imagine was especially difficult for Michael’s father Irving, as he traveled across the South making efforts towards unionizing labor. Slowly, Michael began to give up on this old way of eating – it was a gradual process, perhaps first allowing himself to eat non-Kosher beef, then shellfish, then finally meat and milk together. By the time he married my grandmother, he was a bacon man, and never would have claimed any connection to the laws of Kashrut.
One afternoon in the first year of their marriage, after coming home from work my grandfather called out a honey, I’m home!, placed his hat on the coat rack, and planted a kiss on my grandmother’s cheek before asking, “So what’s for dinner?”
“Pork chops!” My grandmother, Elsa, beamed.
Michael stirred. “What? Pork chops? I can’t eat pork!?”
It was Elsa’s turn to be confused. “But honey, you eat bacon all the time! And ham too! It all comes from pig just the same.”
He shook his head. She continued explaining the broken logic of it, but Michael couldn’t stomach the word pork, the very sound of it, the provocative force of the p that opens it and the cracking k that shuts it.
Michael prided himself on being a rational sort of man, and after a great deal of convincing, eventually my grandmother was able to get him to eat what he before never would. After that moment, there was never any resistance to pork in the house, the final remnant of an old way of eating.
The Blind Mashgiach
Back in the 80s, my family was all over Oberlin campus. The first member of my family to attend was my dad’s first cousin Amy, and she fell so in love with everything here that she convinced my father to give college another try on a smaller campus. A year after my dad showed up, his sister started her first semester here. They all existed on different sides of the social divide on campus, but they were part of each other’s lives enough for my dad and aunt to start to suspect that something was going on between Amy and the young rabbi on campus, whose name was Shimon. It was a long time before anything was confirmed, but soon enough Shimon was officially part of the family.
Shimon has a long white beard and eyes that set their gaze a foot above the head of whoever he’s addressing. It’s hard for me to imagine him back then, a close-cropped black beard and still-seeing eyes. I wonder if he always bore an upturned gaze. As the rabbi on campus, he served as the mashgiach certifying the Kosher status of the Kosher co-op kitchen. It was his job to regularly walk through the kitchen, making sure meat and milk cookware were kept separate, ensuring that fish and meat were not served on the same plates, looking for miniscule forbidden bugs while flipping through leaves of kale like reams of paper. As his eyesight deteriorated, he continued in this role, despite the challenges his blindness posed. He spent decades working as a blind mashgiach, using his hands and depending on the eyes of others. This approach required a great deal of trust in the community, though it worked for many decades
Shimon never let anyone walk through the kitchen without a member of the coop accompanying. He didn’t feel he could serve as mashgiach for a kitchen that had people he did not know walking through. In 2013, this led to OSCA letting go of KHC, transferring the operation of the coop over to College Dining Services. In just a handful of years, without OSCA to advocate for its interests, CDS shut the coop down. After many, many years, Shimon stopped working as a mashgiach.
Our beef with McDonald’s
If it had been up to my brother when we were young, we would have eaten McDonald’s for dinner every night of the week. Gabriel loved everything about the place: the playscape, the 7-foot tall Ronald McDonald clown, the dependability of the food. Most of all he loved the McDonald’s on Dixwell Ave as a space outside the home that welcomed kids. When the report came out that McDonald’s had lied in their claim that they had stopped using beef fat on their fries, my dad didn’t know how to break it to Gabriel. We had to stop going, that was clear – what was unclear was how Gabriel, always particular about food, would take the news.
My dad knew an adult explanation about the laws of Kashrut would never work to turn Gabriel against McDonald’s. He was going to have to think like a kid if he was to make it work.
So he came up with a (hackney) nursery rhyme about the place. Old McDonald had a firm place in our musical vocabulary already, so in a swing of creative genius my dad placed the modifier sad in front and created the song Sad Old McDonald. Every time we passed by the place, on Dixwell or anywhere else, we began to sing Sad Old McDonald in unison, like a pack of Pavlov’s dogs. It worked like a trick, and in an instant our McDonald’s era was over.
Eating at Home
Some of my strongest childhood food memories take place with my head buried deep in the fridge. Growing up, my dad expected that we would keep Kosher in the same way that he did. This meant that we could not eat anything that contained dairy for three hours after eating meat. We didn’t eat meat often, and part of what drew my brothers and I away from it was our reluctance to give up dairy for the next few hours, which was usually part of every dinner we ate. When we had meat for dinner, it would usually sit in a tupperware in the fridge for days, waiting for one of us to cross the line from dairy to meat. There was no individual point when I realized I did not have to keep Kosher if I did not want to, and I can’t recall any big shifts in my eating habits as a kid, rather, treife ways of eating simply creeped slowly into my way of moving through the world, almost without my knowing.
I fell into a practice of standing in the kitchen and listening for footsteps, determining that my father was at least two rooms away before sticking my little head between the two doors of the fridge, grabbing a piece of steak out of a tupperware with my bare hands and shoving it in my mouth, chewing rapidly and silently in the company of the condiments on either side of me before emerging from the fridge, giddy with the invisibility of the beef making its way down my gullet. This is not what we picture when we talk about savoring. Still, it has stuck with me in a way that other encounters with food have not. I can still remember biting against the grain of the steak to create the illusion of it having been cut with a knife, disguising the marks of my teeth.
In tracing this history of Kosher observance in my family, I’m struck by how much faith is involved in Kashrut as a practice. So much of this history plays out in moments where trust was either built or broken. Whether it be the trust of my great grandparents, broken by the sight of the boys throwing meat off the truck they trusted was the Kosher truck, or the way that Shimon was dependent on the eyes of others, put his trust in them to help him certify the Kosher status of the kitchen. There’s a certain faith that goes into Kashrut – it’s not a faith in anything divine, but rather a trust in those that you share your life with. In the old country, this meant trust that your family would observe the laws within the household, that your butcher and your grocer were observing in the same way that you were. In the modern world, it involves a faith in larger industrial systems, in companies that specialize in Kosher meat, in fast food chains that make certain claims about what goes in their food. In both cases, one has to trust that the world around them respects these invisible qualities of a thing, Kosher or not Kosher. I think it’s beautiful that my dad felt like he could trust the world enough to keep Kosher. I hope when I’m old enough I’ll be able to step away from cynicism in the way that he was.
Elijah Freiman is a second-year at Oberlin College majoring in Food Studies. He can be found in Tank Coop eating food out of a large pan. It is his dream to one day taste raw milk. His favorite poem about food might be Onions by William Matthews.
