water, then carefully dry it on clean paper
towels before deciding it wasn’t clean enough to eat and throwing
it out. They didn’t hide Ziploc bags full of meatballs in their
sweater drawer while they combed the Torah to see if it was okay to
eat them. They didn’t throw out blood oranges because they were
convinced that they were, in fact, infused with blood.
I did. Something had changed. I was still obsessed with food,
but suddenly dietetics weren’t the concern. I had discovered
kashrut, or rather, I had invented a new and super-sterile form.
This was the master class, an advanced mathematics. Now I wasn’t
counting just calories, but things you couldn’t see, atoms and
associations and invisible demerits.
Now I was limiting my intake in an entirely different way. This
was an extraordinary exercise in subterfuge, a tremendous feat of
logic and dissection. Every meal was a puzzle to be pieced apart
and rationalized. Behold, the dinner of meat loaf with tomato
sauce, baked beans, and broccoli. This was my theater of war, with
meat and dairy troops to divide and conquer, pork products to
vanquish and defeat.
It was an excruciating and painstaking process. First, I would
drink my milk just to get that out of the way. The broccoli was
buttered, dairy, so that came next, but that was trickier. It had
been buttered from the tub, which was just tainted beyond belief,
loaded with not-kosher toast crumbs, contaminated by knives that
had cut steak and then come back to reload the baked potato. There
were probably whole discs of pepperoni floating in there too, but
who could find them under the big chunks of shrimp?
It was a mess. I had to blot off all the butter, and once the
broccoli was bare, I could eat only enough to evade detection,
since it was so unkosher that I probably shouldn’t be eating it in
the first place. Then I would push food around my plate for twenty
minutes or so, a pause between the meat and the milk.
“It’s too hot,” I explained, blowing on the lukewarm, congealing
mass. “I’m just waiting for it to cool off.”
Finally it was time for the meat loaf, trickiest of all, deadly
but compulsory. It was crowned by a tomato sauce topping that my
mother made, inexplicably, with a powdered dairy creamer, which had
to be scraped off and moved aside. The fork was now irretrievably
tainted, so I would have to drop it and go get a new one. The next
problem was that the meat had been baked in a loaf pan that had
been greased with generic-brand shortening, containing lard ,
actual lard . The entire perimeter was tainted. Only the
center could be eaten, and of this, as little as possible, because
it wasn’t kosher beef to begin with. The beans were too porky to
eat at all and had to be hidden under the meat loaf rinds.
“Very nice,” my sister observed, clearing the table. “Once again
Jenny has turned her dinner into a work of art.” She cocked her
head and peered at the meat loaf columns. “I shall title this one
‘The Barfenon.’”
But as long as I ate at least something substantive, I got away
with it. At this point I’d been so weird about food for so long
that the new weirdness went largely unnoticed. And my parents had
given up on table manners long ago. We came to dinner in our
bathing suits, sat on our feet, chewed with our mouths open, and
belched at will. Only once did they actually banish one of us from
the table. My sister was five and newly enamored of a rather
colorful phrase. She was sent to finish her dinner down the hall.
“If you’re going to use bathroom words at the dinner table, then
you can eat your dinner in the bathroom,” my mother shouted after
her. For Vicky this wasn’t a punishment but a novel pleasure. The
neighbors happened to drop by in the middle of this and were
baffled to find my sister sitting on the bath mat with her plate on
the toilet seat, happily shoveling down her supper.
But some picking and stalling, that was fine. For months, my
parents
towels before deciding it wasn’t clean enough to eat and throwing
it out. They didn’t hide Ziploc bags full of meatballs in their
sweater drawer while they combed the Torah to see if it was okay to
eat them. They didn’t throw out blood oranges because they were
convinced that they were, in fact, infused with blood.
I did. Something had changed. I was still obsessed with food,
but suddenly dietetics weren’t the concern. I had discovered
kashrut, or rather, I had invented a new and super-sterile form.
This was the master class, an advanced mathematics. Now I wasn’t
counting just calories, but things you couldn’t see, atoms and
associations and invisible demerits.
Now I was limiting my intake in an entirely different way. This
was an extraordinary exercise in subterfuge, a tremendous feat of
logic and dissection. Every meal was a puzzle to be pieced apart
and rationalized. Behold, the dinner of meat loaf with tomato
sauce, baked beans, and broccoli. This was my theater of war, with
meat and dairy troops to divide and conquer, pork products to
vanquish and defeat.
It was an excruciating and painstaking process. First, I would
drink my milk just to get that out of the way. The broccoli was
buttered, dairy, so that came next, but that was trickier. It had
been buttered from the tub, which was just tainted beyond belief,
loaded with not-kosher toast crumbs, contaminated by knives that
had cut steak and then come back to reload the baked potato. There
were probably whole discs of pepperoni floating in there too, but
who could find them under the big chunks of shrimp?
It was a mess. I had to blot off all the butter, and once the
broccoli was bare, I could eat only enough to evade detection,
since it was so unkosher that I probably shouldn’t be eating it in
the first place. Then I would push food around my plate for twenty
minutes or so, a pause between the meat and the milk.
“It’s too hot,” I explained, blowing on the lukewarm, congealing
mass. “I’m just waiting for it to cool off.”
Finally it was time for the meat loaf, trickiest of all, deadly
but compulsory. It was crowned by a tomato sauce topping that my
mother made, inexplicably, with a powdered dairy creamer, which had
to be scraped off and moved aside. The fork was now irretrievably
tainted, so I would have to drop it and go get a new one. The next
problem was that the meat had been baked in a loaf pan that had
been greased with generic-brand shortening, containing lard ,
actual lard . The entire perimeter was tainted. Only the
center could be eaten, and of this, as little as possible, because
it wasn’t kosher beef to begin with. The beans were too porky to
eat at all and had to be hidden under the meat loaf rinds.
“Very nice,” my sister observed, clearing the table. “Once again
Jenny has turned her dinner into a work of art.” She cocked her
head and peered at the meat loaf columns. “I shall title this one
‘The Barfenon.’”
But as long as I ate at least something substantive, I got away
with it. At this point I’d been so weird about food for so long
that the new weirdness went largely unnoticed. And my parents had
given up on table manners long ago. We came to dinner in our
bathing suits, sat on our feet, chewed with our mouths open, and
belched at will. Only once did they actually banish one of us from
the table. My sister was five and newly enamored of a rather
colorful phrase. She was sent to finish her dinner down the hall.
“If you’re going to use bathroom words at the dinner table, then
you can eat your dinner in the bathroom,” my mother shouted after
her. For Vicky this wasn’t a punishment but a novel pleasure. The
neighbors happened to drop by in the middle of this and were
baffled to find my sister sitting on the bath mat with her plate on
the toilet seat, happily shoveling down her supper.
But some picking and stalling, that was fine. For months, my
parents
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