Sirius XM Podcasts Hey, everyone.
It's Dan here.
And this week's reheat that we have for you is kind of a personal one for me.
You're going to hear me talk at length with my wife Janie, and my mother-in-law Alice, about our different relationships to Jewish food traditions.
In this one, a bunch of you have requested this episode.
Morgan in Detroit says I grew up in a kosher home, similar to Janie and my partner did not grow up in a Jewish household.
I'm rethinking my connection to kosher foods and rethinking a future that I always imagined involved a kosher household.
These are complicated issues.
And I think that, whatever your background is, you can probably relate to the idea of different families, different traditions, coming together.
And how do you navigate that?
Now, this episode pairs especially well with the impossible pork episode we released this week, in which a Muslim and a Jew both contemplate whether impossible pork, which is technically vegan and not pork at all, is okay for them to eat.
Does it violate Muslim and Jewish traditions or is it quote unquote halal slash kosher?
Remember, if there's an older episode of The Sporkful you want us to reheat, send me an email or voice memo to hello at sporkfulcom.
Tell me your first name, location, what episode you want to hear, and why.
We take requests.
We can't wait to hear from you.
Thanks and enjoy.
How would you describe the differences in your and my respective approaches to food?
I think I don't get so as excited about food.
So there's a few things.
This is my wife, Janie.
I'm also very frugal.
I also have a more sensitive stomach and I feel bad because I know that you want to try new foods and go out to eat.
And sometimes yeah, it's a kind of combination of like what is this going to do to my stomach and how much is this going to cost?
So, you know, I tend to like more basic foods.
I'm happy to have cereal for dinner.
And so, like when your family went on vacation, you're telling me that your mom did not put together a folder, a binder, full of restaurant research.
I'm pretty positive that neither of my parents at all considered where we would eat.
What did they think about?
They thought about it.
We basically did two things when we went away.
We would eat and we would wait to eat.
Sometimes while waiting to eat, we would do activities together.
Yeah, that's a really big difference in where we're coming from.
And the differences in our approaches to food don't end there.
Janie and I are both white Jewish people from the New York area.
On paper, you'd think it should be an easy fit, right?
And in many ways, it is.
But not so much with food.
And it goes way beyond our personalities and our family styles, because Janie grew up in a kosher home and I didn't.
When we moved in together, we had to decide how kosher our home would be.
And that was tough.
I remember having a lot of fights.
I remember feeling like I was giving up a lot more.
Like this was something that you knew about me.
You knew that like my family kept kosher.
I was trying to keep kosher.
But then it was like I was slowly like chipping away a few of the rules I had for myself.
And now that we have kids, we have to figure out which of those rules should apply to them.
Today on The Sporkful, my wife and I discuss our different feelings about Jewish food traditions.
Plus, we talk with Janie's mom, my mother-in-law, about why kosher rules are so important to her and how she feels about the choices we've made.
Would I be happier if you kept kosher and I kept kosher?
Yeah.
That's all coming up.
Stick around.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
This is part four of a series on race, culture, and food called Your Mom's Food.
It's about the complications that can come up when we pass our cultures on from one generation to the next.
As I said, my wife Janie was raised in a kosher home.
You probably know that means no pork, no shellfish, but it actually means a lot more.
All the meats have to be kosher, which means they have to be slaughtered in a certain way, among other things.
So even chicken isn't kosher if it doesn't follow the rules.
Kosher also means meat and dairy can't touch or be served at the same meal.
You're supposed to have separate sets of dishes and silverware and pots and pans.
One set for meat, one for dairy.
This goes back to a line in the Old Testament about how you shouldn't boil a kid in its mother's milk kid as in baby goat.
So, for example, this rule means no cheeseburgers.
Now, when I was a kid, my brother and I drank milk with our mooshu pork.
That sentence still makes Janie mildly nauseous.
Growing up, she did sometimes feel like she was missing out, especially when a trace amount of lard stood in the way of a coveted treat.
Twinkies were not kosher.
And, you know, kids were bringing Twinkies into school and I wanted that.
But I think Drake's brand was kosher.
So I could get a Yodel or a Ding Dong, but the Twinkie was off limits.
Do you remember ever getting angry with your mom, being like, this is unfair.
Everyone else gets to eat these foods.
How come I can't?
I don't like this mom.
I feel like I just knew that there were rules that we had in our house that we followed.
And I don't remember being angry with her.
I remember being upset that I couldn't have White Castle more often.
And my mom really like i guess, the kosher rules aside, i'm gonna side with your mom on this one like that's what it was for her, like she knew it was a treat, it wasn't so expensive, it wasn't about the money.
She just thought that, you know, it was pretty gross.
Like she's cooking this really great, you know right.
She's like laboring in the kitchen for hours after she comes home from work to make you homemade food and you're like can i have this like piece of like post-industrial sludge in a box?
Yeah, am i putting it correctly?
Would you say if i say that, like You sometimes didn't like the rules, but you didn't really question them?
Yeah, I liked going to other kids' houses to see what they were eating and eating their food.
I don't remember fighting.
I think I knew it was a battle.
I wasn't going to fight with my mom to bring in the dinosaur chicken nuggets.
I knew that wouldn't happen.
And I think actually a part of me would have felt bad if...
If I didn't make her break her tradition because of me.
So I kind of knew like that's not going to happen in our house.
But I liked going to other kids' houses so I could try these things.
Once you were out of the house.
Now you left 18.
You were in college, you lived in Chicago, you lived in California.
Like you could have gone and had a cheeseburger.
And even then when you were out of the house, you still didn't.
I ate out at places and I would eat at restaurants where I'm sure there was milk in the mashed potatoes and there was chicken.
And you know, and I would eat that together and I would eat ice cream for dessert after having some chicken.
But I just wouldn't order it.
I wouldn't order the cheeseburger because it just felt weird and wrong.
You didn't want to see the dairy touching the meat.
Right.
I think that a lot of my frustration with the kosher rules maybe was indicative of a difference in our personalities, because the religious rules that I want to keep in my life are the ones that have some sort of positive lesson for making the world a better place or for teaching you to be a better person, or something.
I don't like the idea of saying, well, this is the way it's always been done.
Therefore, we should always do it that way, just because it's always been done that way, because there's a lot of terrible things that every religion has that are carried forward because it's always been done that way.
So that doesn't seem like a good reason to me to eat a certain way.
Yeah.
And I get that from a logical point.
I'm not doing it because I believe that this is how God commanded it.
I
I agree that it's not teaching our kids the most important lessons in life.
I think just from growing up and having the two sets of dishes and eating a certain way.
That's what feels comfortable to me.
And it would feel a little strange for me to have my kids eat a different way than I'm used to eating.
But there's also part of it and we've discussed this in the past that you said that you feel like there's a long stand like this is a tradition.
This isn't just about how you grew up.
Right.
So that's the other part of it, that for so many years, generations and generations of Jewish people in my family who've kept kosher, you know now like is it going to end with me?
Am I going to be the one that's going to stop?
So I'm frustrated by kosher rules because it feels to me like tradition for tradition's sake.
But Janie likes kosher rules for that exact reason.
She likes the idea that she's connecting with her heritage by eating the same way so many of our ancestors did.
To get a better sense of why that's so important to Janie, you have to know a bit more about her family.
We didn't make a big deal out of food.
So you didn't like spend all day looking forward to what you were going to eat that night?
Never gave it a thought.
This is Alice Fosner, Janie's mom, my mother-in-law.
She grew up in communist Czechoslovakia in the years after World War II.
She and her parents and her two sisters lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a small city called Kosice.
It's near the Hungarian border in what's now Slovakia.
After the war, they were one of the few Jewish families living in Kosice, and their home was strictly kosher.
So my mom would go in the villages or in the market and buy a live chicken.
And about once in three months these ritual slaughterers came by and then the chicken was slaughtered.
And then every part of the chicken was used for food.
By ritual slaughterer Alice means someone who knows how to slaughter an animal in keeping with kosher law, so the meat would be kosher.
When Alice and I talked, Janie was there too, and she also had some questions.
Where did you keep the chicken?
In a big box on the balcony outside the door.
But was it like your pet?
No, never got friends with it.
It was more embarrassing because I lived in a city and it was very embarrassing.
No one else did that.
And even walking to have the chicken killed, we put them in like big canvas bags.
And my sisters and I prayed that the chickens shouldn't make a sound because it was really embarrassing.
Just because it felt sort of like a country thing to do for people in the city?
Because no one else I knew did that.
What about outside the home?
Of course, we always, like all children, wanted to eat at the neighbor's, and their food was always more delicious.
And my mom was pretty good about it.
She didn't encourage us, but she didn't make an issue out of it.
So, yes, I did taste pork and bacon and all that in the neighbor's.
There's one story in particular you told me about a campfire experience.
It was in high school.
One of my high school friends who was living in a village.
They had this big whatever it's called the pork when they killed the pig.
Like a slaughter.
Right.
And that's a whole big celebration.
So I was invited and yeah, I tasted all of the different things.
And I felt like I got punished on the way home because I missed the bus.
It was in the winter and my foot froze.
It was worth it though.
But we were cooking s'mores when we were all away together a few weeks ago and you were saying yeah, these s'mores in the campfire are pretty good, but let me tell you what's really good.
No comparison.
Pieces of bacon that you put on the end of the stick over the fire and it drips the fat on this.
Fresh rye bread doesn't compare hands down.
Do you remember asking your mom why do we have to follow these rules and even so many other Jewish people in our town don't follow them?
Yeah, we had a lot of arguments about God, about keeping kosher, about.
I guess teenagers rebel against parents to begin with, but we didn't want to be different.
And my mom.
She was the only one surviving from her family and she kept her faith and that was not negotiable for her.
Surviving after the Holocaust.
She lost seven brothers and sisters and her parents, and she clung to her faith without wavering.
And yeah, she wanted to keep everything that was possible.
And of course, we children didn't like it, and the restrictions were not making us very happy.
But yeah, now I understand.
I really do.
Did you always think that you would marry someone who was Jewish?
Yes.
Was it 100% in your mind?
I dated non-Jewish boys, but I would never dare to defy my parents in that.
That was never a question.
My parents always very strongly felt because of what they went through.
That was a lot of guilt put into us saying how we need to continue the chain.
Too many people were killed during the Holocaust, and it's our responsibility to carry on.
And when your kids were getting married, was it important to you that they marry Jews?
Yes, it was.
And, to be totally truthful, I was a little disappointed that both kids didn't have kosher meals at the wedding.
Why was it disappointing to you?
Well, when I pictured that day, one day down the road for my children, I just pictured it to be in New York, a kosher affair.
But wasn't the main thing?
It was, I kept telling myself, this is not the day about me.
This is the young couple's day.
Why was it important to you to raise your kids kosher?
Well, in our house, it was very important.
I also wanted my parents, when they came to visit, to feel comfortable eating in my home, so it had to be strictly kosher.
But I wasn't that strict with the kids outside the house either.
I know we took them to McDonald's when you were little, and you did eat at friends' houses.
I mean, realistically, even many of our Jewish friends didn't and still don't keep kosher, so...
You know we live in a different community, but I felt very strongly about continuing the tradition that I grew up with.
But I was telling Dan, like at McDonald's, I would get like a hamburger or chicken nuggets.
Did you tell me not to get a cheeseburger or did I just know?
I would never buy you a cheeseburger.
So you said that wasn't.
I drew the line.
And when I went to friends' houses, did you tell them what I could eat or not eat?
No, no.
I think that most of our friends knew that we keep kosher at home and respected.
Neither of your kids are as kosher in their homes today as they were with you growing up.
How do you feel about that?
I learned not to think about it much.
These are my children and yeah, I don't have a huge degree of discomfort.
Would I be happier if you kept kosher and they kept kosher?
Yeah.
I see, in both of my children's lives, Shabbat being a factor in your lives when maybe 10 years ago you wouldn't have thought that it would be.
It really warms my heart to know that you pick things that are important and meaningful to you from the Jewish tradition whether it's about keeping kosher or keeping the holidays, and what you observe and you know, you find your own meanings.
And the times that we've been at a restaurant and you see Becky, my daughter, your granddaughter, eating bacon.
I cringe a little.
I cringe when you eat it too.
And I cringe when you talk about pork.
I said, okay, I'm so happy that there is a kosher segment now.
So now you have a sense of where both Janie and I were coming from when we moved in together and why there was real tension around food.
Coming up, we'll look back on that time.
Were you concerned when you found out that I was raised kosher kind of, was trying to keep a little bit more kosher.
Like, did you think that was going to be an issue for us going out?
I did start to think far ahead, like, what about when we live together?
What about when we have kids?
I guess I kind of, to be honest, I kind of always figured...
You'd break me.
Something like that.
You're hoping.
Plus we'll talk about how having kids has changed the debate.
Stick around.
Hope you're hungry, because it's time for some ads.
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Thanks.
Now back to Janie and me.
We moved in together 12 years ago, got married 10 years ago.
Man, like I said, in the early days, there was tension around how kosher our home should be.
Do you remember when we first started living together and we were kind of like we were having some disagreements over like exactly where the line should be drawn?
Because you were never saying like, we should have separate dishes.
We should have two sinks.
We should have, you were never saying that.
And I was never pushing for like, let's cook bacon all the time and eat pork constantly.
So we had to kind of like negotiate sort of like a tenuous compromise.
Do you remember what the rules of the compromise were?
Yeah.
Like in terms of like meats, we try to buy like local meat and like organic.
That is more important than kosher labels.
So, you know, we like to buy stuff from the farmer's market.
So in terms of the meats being kosher, what was it?
We were trying not to have meat and dairy cooked together.
Yeah, that was always where there was difficulty.
Because I remember one of the rules that I agreed to was okay, I won't cook pork or shellfish in our house.
Which to me was like a major concession.
People who are listening to this right now.
I'm sure there are jaws hitting the floor right now that I don't cook pork or shellfish in my own house.
Only if I eat it out, or sometimes once in a while, I will buy it cooked elsewhere and bring it home and eat it at home.
But I don't ever cook.
I remember having a lot of fights.
I remember feeling like I was giving up a lot more.
Like this was something that you knew about me.
You knew that like my family kept kosher.
I was trying to keep kosher.
But then it was like I was slowly like chipping away a few of the you know kind of rules I had for myself.
And, you know, like you having a lot of questions like, can I...
Can I cook this?
Like, what if it's on aluminum foil, if it's separated?
Like, what, you know, can I put cheese on my food after it's cooked?
If it's not cooked together, but maybe I have to spit it out after.
It was tense.
But you said when we're out of the house, eat whatever and bring in the to-go.
But the meat and dairy, that was a tension point.
So I'd be like well, I just want to put a little butter on this chicken.
You know, and you like you did not.
Yeah, I mean, but it's gotten a lot more black.
So right.
So in the beginning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now especially having kids who want sprinkled cheese on everything.
Right.
That's what they call Parmesan, grated Parmesan cheese.
Right.
Right.
So like when you make spaghetti with meat sauce and they insist on having sprinkled cheese on top in our kitchen on our plates.
How do you feel about that?
You know, it still feels like that doesn't belong there.
Like you don't put cheese on top of meat sauce.
Like that's strange.
But I think that I've also changed a lot too because of the kosher rules of meat and dairy.
My mom used a lot of margarine growing up.
Like we had mashed potatoes a lot.
So the potatoes had margarine in them.
And I don't cook with margarine.
So...
I'm using butter a lot more too.
So definitely, like you said, the walls are coming down on that because I am putting butter in meat dishes, because I'd rather use butter than margarine.
Because you feel it's healthier.
Right, and it tastes better.
Yes.
When we were having those early arguments about kosher rules in our house, I admit I was worried about what would happen when we had kids.
I thought it would create this new battleground.
But that hasn't happened.
To some degree, we both mellowed on the issue.
If I'm being honest, though, Janie's budged more than I have.
But I don't really know for sure why.
I've never asked her.
I think maybe I was afraid even bringing it up would bring back old resentments.
So when we had this conversation recently, I tried to get a sense of how she feels about all this now.
We've had a couple of interesting kind of moments that come to mind.
One even happened a few weeks ago.
We were away with your parents at a hotel and there was a breakfast buffet, and our daughter Becky, came back to the table with bacon.
And the couple of times that I've seen your mom see Becky eat bacon it does I do sort of perceive that she like kind of winces a little bit when she sees that.
And then I also perceive that, while you feel like we're making the right decision, there's also part of you that feels guilty when you see that your mom has that reaction.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it does make me feel a little guilty.
And then it also makes me feel guilty that you might not be cooking the food that you want in our house.
The most important things when I think about us as a family, those things aren't food.
They're not?
They're teaching our kids to be good people, going on vacations, doing fun stuff.
Like, I want the kids to be happy because I think that you get so much more excited about food and sharing the experience of eating with our kids.
Like I wouldn't take that away from you.
So I do see that things change.
At first I never thought we'd have cheeseburgers at our house, but Becky loves it and she and it makes you so happy to have an eating buddy with our daughter.
So you know, those things to me are more important than you know, thinking back on, like the culture of ways, I can still eat the way that I want to eat at home and you can eat the way you want to eat.
And maybe I don't know if the kids are going to sense that I'm eating something a little bit different than you're eating.
Do you think the kids are aware?
I don't think that they're aware really of this food difference.
I've never heard Becky say like, how come we don't eat bacon at home?
Or how come Grammy never cooks bacon?
Yeah, I don't think that she's asked that.
I think she thinks that bacon is like this special magical food that happens when you go out to eat.
I'm not sure she even thinks that it's possible to cook bacon at home, because when she finds that out, it's going to be yeah, we'll have another time.
I think she thinks it's like the magic restaurant food.
When the time comes that our kids do ask why mama doesn't eat cheeseburgers, Janie's ready with an answer.
Maybe I would say, like, this is how I grew up.
You know that Grammy and Poppy keep kosher and I grew up eating only hamburgers, so I really like hamburgers.
This is how I like to eat my burger.
When Janie was growing up, she wanted to break away from the kosher rules, but at the same time she didn't really want her mom to abandon them.
Today in our home, I think that tension lives on.
Why would I put restrictions on my kids when I remember really being upset with those restrictions as a kid?
So are you saying we want to start cooking bacon in the house?
Is that where this is going?
No, I think it made me stronger.
They're going to have to suffer.
Oh, you're saying more restrictions.
Maybe a built character.
Maybe one day you'll cook bacon for the kids, but I still don't want it in anywhere near my cereal bowl.
Special thank you to my wife, Janie, and my mother-in-law, Alice, for being a part of this episode.
I really appreciate it.
This show is produced by Anne Sani and me.
Dan Charles is our editor.
Music help from Black Label Music.
This pork was a production of Stitcher.
Our executive producers are Chris Bannon and Jenny Radelet.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
And I'm Ari Strauss, from Washington DC, reminding you to eat more, eat better and eat more better.
This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer.
The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
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Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
