A Renewed Koshrut for American Jews

A Renewed Koshrut for American Jews

Abandoning the Western Diet

Rabbi Dov Gartenberg

4/4/08

 

As Jews we have a thing about food. Especially around Passover when we become a mass of food inspectors, looking for evidence of Hametz in our homes and in the foods we buy. No matter your relationship to koshrut, Jewish culture has a concern about the food we eat. Food for us is connected to story. The foods we eat on Passover remind us of the traumas of slavery and the going out from Egypt. Food serves as symbols that teach us empathy, the bitter herb helps us to remember the bitterness of the slaves, the matza connects us to the experience of the poor.

The regular kosher dietary laws also reflect a moral passion about food. We are supposed to drain the blood from an animal that we kill for food. The rabbis teach that if an animal is to be slaughtered for food, it must be killed in a way that reduces suffering to a minimum. The consumption of meat, while permitted as a concession to human natur,e is constrained by laws of slaughtering and the limitation of the number of animals that can be eaten. The level of detail of these laws leaves us with a proud legacy (something which I think many of us misunderstood) as a people that is very concerned about what enters our mouths and the impact of the way we eat both on creatures and the world around us.

I just finished an amazing book by the award winning author, Michael Pollan, called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. It is a book of remarkable clarity and powerful argument about the ills caused by the way we eat in America.

"The chronic diseases that now kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains: the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy."

 

"Various populations thrived on diets that were what we'd call high fat, low fat, or high carb; all meat or all plant; indeed here have been traditional diets based on just about any kind of whole food you can imagine. Lesson: That human animal is well adapted to a great many different diets. The Western diet is not one of them. "

 

"An American born in 2000 has a one in 3 chance of developing diabetes in his lifetime; the risk is even greater for a Hispanic American or African American. A diagnosis of diabetes subtracts 12 years from one's life and living with the condition incurs medical costs of $13,000 a year (compared with $2500 for someone without diabetes)."

 
 

"This is a global pandemic in the making, but a most unusual one, because it involves no virus or bacteria, no microbe of any kind-just a way of eating."

 

I know, because I am one of its victims. I found out last year that my body crossed the boundary to become vulnerable to Type two diabetes. There is no history of it in my family, no predisposition. I had to change my lifestyle or face the harsh realities of a condition that worsens over time. Most of all it made me aware of our food choices that are all around us.

 

Our ancestors accepted koshrut on themselves in part as a moral stance in relationship to their world and to affirm their identity as Jews. As modern Americans living with the ills of the Western diet we have an even more difficult challenge before us that demands a new koshrut. I want to introduce this to you tonight, albeit in a brief form. I urge you to get the book and read it with me. Here is one part of what Michael Pollan argues we must do to reverse the ills of the Western Diet.

 

There are three rules to this new Koshrut:

1. Just Eat Food:
   
2. Not Too Much
   
3. Mostly Plants
   

   
    

   Under each of these categories there are several helpful rules-halachot. I just want to cover tonight in this short talk the rules of "Just Eat Food".
   

   
    

First we must acknowledge our confusion around food. The key to overcoming the confusion over food is to simplify and to avoid industrialized food.

 

"Real food has disappeared from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world. Taking food's place on the shelves has been an unending stream of food like substitutes, some seventeen thousand new ones every year." Avoid as much as possible processed and refined foods. Here are 8 rule to start off with.

 
 

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Because even our mother's and grandmothers are confused.
   

 
 

1. Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
   

 
 

1. Avoid food products containing ingredients that are as unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that include high fructose corn syrup.
   

 

Consider Sara lee's Soft and Smooth Whole Grain White Bread

 

Enriched bleached flour [wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamin monoitrate (vitamin B,) riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid], water, whole grains [whole wheat flour, brown rice flour (rice flour, rice bran)] high fructose corn syrup, whey, wheat gluten, yeast, cellulose. Contains 2% or less of each of the following, calcium sulfate, vegetable oil (soybean and/or cottonseed oils) salt, butter, cream, salt) dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: mono-and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, ascorbic acid, enzymes, azordicarbonamide), guar gum, calcium propionate (preservative, distilled vinegar, yeast nutrients (monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate) corn starch, natural flavor, betacarotene (color), vitamin D, soy lecithin, soy flour.

 

The plastic wrapper ads: "Good source of whole grain and low fat".

 
 

1. Avoid food products that make health claims:
   

   
    

   "for a food product to make health claims on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed than a whole food. Don't forget that trans fat rich margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was healthier than traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. "
   

 
 

1. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
   

 
 

1. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
   

 

1. CSA box Community Supported Agriculture. Subscribe to a farm and receive a weekly box of produce or from your garden. Shake the hand that feeds you.
   

 

1. Food is about pleasure, about community, about family, and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.