PART 1: Theory.

Rules are always made to be broken. That’s what my tattoo says. The imaginary one. On my forehead. Maybe between my shoulder blades. And the first rule I like to break is the one about kosher food. They make food to taste a certain way, its nothing to do with the religion of the food. Steak is strictly non-observant. Broccoli is atheist. Whereas lettuce is agnostic, which is why its limp, soggy and has no redeeming qualities or value.

Hindus won’t eat beef. The poor peasant farmers starve in the lean years whilst a herd of great, fat cattle graze, worshipped, in their fields. Buddhists are vegetarians. As they deserve to be. Muslims won’t drink alcohol, otherwise their food laws are pretty much the same as the Jewish ones. Unsurprising as they both stem from Abraham. The old bible geezer, Abraham, not the short order chef at Nobu, Abraham.

Jews have made a total fucking industry on NOT eating things. The rules have their own rules. It started as, basically, ‘don’t eat pig or shellfish and don’t mix milk with meat’ (I’m guessing these started for health reasons when cleaning dead animals wasn’t very skilful. And lots of cultures have issues with not cooking an animal in its mother’s milk). And as loose guidelines, these are good, if you like that kind of thing, and they’re workable.

But then the rabbis get involved. And it ends up an exercise in pedantry. Where everything you eat (and I mean EVERY-THING!!!!) including tooth paste, mouthwash… you got it?, everything has be made, produced, grown, manufactured in ways that not only adhere to the rules, but that are monitored at every single step of the way to ensure that the wheat in your daily bread didn’t at some point eat a pig. That a slaughtered lamb (and only slaughtered in a very special, monitored, controlled, observed way, obviously) hasn’t come in contact with some spilt milk, a lost prawn or anything which would render it ‘unkosher’. Once ‘approved’ it can be packaged and sold in a shop which again is monitored all day every day. Now that’s KOSHER!

Which is why it cost four times the price of any normal product. An expensive label. And the same with restaurants. To be ‘kosher’, everything served, every plate, glass, knife and fork and coffee bean has to be ‘watched’ to ensure it hasn’t slipped into a lobster when no-one was looking, or been accidentally abducted by a bacon seller.

So now you know the ‘rules’. In part 2, the next riveting episode, you’ll learn how to break them.

Happy Monday

A xxxx