Jewish Food I: Boundaries

On the first day of my seventh grade music class, our teacher asked us to define the word “music” for him. This was a brave thing to do. When facing a room filled with eleven- and twelve-year-olds who have just enrolled in a prestigious test-admission school and who have been told to think very highly of their own intellects, one should think twice before asking them what might be taken for a stupid question. What is music? We’d all been around music since birth, and it was a waste of time to ask us to define it when everyone knew that music was …

Um.

• Sound with distinct pitches? But what about non-pitched percussion? What about rap? And some sounds have distinct, music-like pitches but would never be considered music, except maybe by John Cage.
• How about rhythmic sound, then? But lots of music doesn’t have a distinct rhythm or meter, and “rhythmic sound” would include the sound of a jackhammer, which you probably don’t think of as music (unless you’re John Cage).
• Artistically manipulated sound? A talented stage actor reciting a monologue by Shakespeare is manipulating sound artistically, but we don’t call it music. (John Cage probably would have been more interested in the sound of an audience member sneezing at the onset of “Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once / That make ingrateful man!” [King Lear, Act III, Scene II].)

Now that I’m no longer eleven years old—and now that “musician” is one of the things I tell people who don’t know what a cantor is but want to know my profession in a single word—I’m better able to appreciate how hard it is to define things that surround us so completely that we rarely think about them. If you’ve always known what music is and assume your audience has as well, why bother to formulate a sentence, paragraph or book to tell anyone what it is? It can’t be made known because it’s already known!

Loyal readers may have noticed—but will be forgiven if they haven’t—that for a blog about food and Judaism, Kemach Torah has barely touched on the subject of Jewish food. That’s not an accident. I’ve avoided talking about “Jewish food” because I don’t know exactly what that is. Of course, I and most people I know recognize some foods as Jewish and others as non-Jewish, but we might differ on which and why. What’s the qualifying factor? For some it may be a matter of technical distinctions, especially with regard to what’s kosher and what ain’t, but for most of us it’s a gut thing. A roast beef sandwich with Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato is treyf because it contains both meat and dairy products, but the mayo is what really makes it non-Jewish fare. (Jews add mustard, thank you.) Lenny Bruce understood this, and assumed his audience did too:

Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. [Editor's note: I have found no indication that Gail Borden, the dairy farmer who invented evaporated milk, was Jewish.] Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.

All Drake’s Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda’s very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish.

So what are the qualities that make food Jewish? Must it be eaten primarily by Jews? Does food have to be kosher in order to be Jewish, and is food that’s kosher inherently Jewish or not? Should food have been created by Jews to be considered Jewish? How long a history should a given product or recipe have within a Jewish community before it ceases to be a food that Jews happen to like and becomes, as it were, part of the tribe? I don’t know any hard and fast answers to these questions, but I plan to explore them over the next few weeks, bli neder.

(The “bli neder” comes into play because my dear wife is 35 weeks pregnant, and it has been pointed out to me recently that that the last time a woman in her family line stayed pregnant beyond 37 weeks … well, let’s just say Guadalcanal was a very interesting place around that time. Parents of newborns tell me that sleep deprivation and the needs of an infant make it hard to get much of anything done, and if they are joking then their timing is way off, because they seem to be utterly serious and completely exhausted. Anyway, thanks in advance for your patience!)