One major piece of traveling is the food, and many destinations are famous for their must-try cuisine, but most people don’t think about what might be cut from their diet. Here in California, we are blessed with a variety of different cuisines of good quality, and there’s not a dietary restriction followed by a large portion of the state. During my stay in Israel, I was not only missing some of my staple foods, but also observing the laws of Kashrut.
Now what makes food kosher? Most people know that pork and shellfish are not kosher, but why? For a land animal to be kosher, it must have cloven hooves and chew their cud, which means pigs along with camels, horses, and more are not kosher. As for sea animals, the Torah states that they need to have fins and scales. The laws surrounding birds are more complicated, but the most common is chicken, which is kosher. On top of this, all animals must be slaughtered, and prepared in a kosher way, any animal killed otherwise is referred to as the yiddish word “treif.” The last law is to not mix meat and dairy, this is derived from the line “do not cook a child in its mother’s milk,” which is stated multiple times throughout the Torah.
As a less observant Jew, I don’t keep kosher. I don’t eat pork, and I eat very little shellfish, but I mix meat and dairy by consuming them together, and only having one set of plates. While in Israel, I wasn’t careful about waiting three hours after eating dairy before eating meat, but the individual meals I was served were kosher. The school provided all of the meals, but since they weren’t always the best sometimes we’d order food.
The dishes were actually the easy part because the cheder ochel (cafeteria) staff would either put out the meat or dairy dishes. It actually took me a second to process the fact that the blue trays were used for dairy meals, and the brown trays for meat meals. I wasn’t in charge of it nor did I pay attention so it didn’t process. Not having dietary restrictions means not thinking or paying attention to labels and ingredients.
Living in Israel definitely caused me to miss a lot of foods. The options when ordering were Mediterranean, pasta, pizza, sushi, fast food, and mediocre burgers. I was craving good tacos probably from the moment I stepped foot onto my El Al flight in August. It was in fact one of my first meals back in America. Along with that I missed good *cheese* burgers. Not mixing meat and dairy wasn’t too hard. A lot of the time it didn’t even cross my mind that I was missing it, unless I was eating a dry hamburger. In Israel the vegan cheese is better than elsewhere, but nothing can beat a good real cheese. Again of course one of my first meals back was a good cheeseburger, but this time it was before I got back to the states, for it was in Poland.
Of course there was food I missed while in Israel, but now that I’m back I long for good Mediterranean food. In the boundaries or where we were allowed to go off campus, there were at least six different falafel places, all really good. Then there was shawarma, shakshuka, sabich, rugelach, schnitzel, babka and of course our favorite smoothie place, sobres. Finding good hummus here is a struggle, nothing has the right ratio of chickpea to tachina or is the perfect consistency. Most of the pita is very flat and sad. Any food that requires cooking is not really available, in good quality. I’ve learned it’s easy to take simplicity for granted when looking for food, either in finding what I want and also whether or not I can eat it.
