By: Charles Lauer
I was little apprehensive about going on the eating tour this past Tuesday. Partially because I was worried I might have to pay for everything (and I barely had enough money for the bus ride home) and partially because, until the beginning of this year, I had only eaten things that were certified Kosher.
In case you don’t know, eating Kosher is a traditional Jewish practice that imposes many rules and regulates on what you can and can’t eat. Some of these rules include: forbidding the eating of meat and milk simultaneously, banning a decent size of the animal kingdom from Jewish consumption, and requiring Jewish oversight in the cooking or baking of almost any food you could hope to eat.
It put a real limitation on what devoted Jews can eat. They can’t walk into a random pizza shop or pick up a hot dog from a street vendor or… really go on an eating tour. They don’t have the same edible freedom as their Non-Jewish neighbors and often times that can be frightening. (Like, for example, I can’t remember a family vacation where my Mom didn’t pack an entire grocery store into the trunk of our minivan. She’d always be neurotic about the possibility of us getting to where we’re going, only to discover that there was nothing in the vicinity we could actually eat.) So to ensure that there was always kosher food around, devoted Jews formed their own grocery stores, restaurants, and cultural enclaves to house them.
I live in one of these enclaves. And, understandably, it’s where I get most of my food.
This doesn’t mean, though, that I (and the rest of my community) simply eat Matzo Balls three courses a day, 24/7. (Although, I’d love to give that a try) Prodomaniently Jewish towns have a fair amount of diverse cuisine. We have Chinese restaurants run by people in Yarmulkes, fried chicken places where your waitress might be covering her hair, and Mexican places where the guy making your enchilada might be thoroughly Hasidic. Don’t get me wrong, Jewish cuisine is diverse. But due to the seemingly endless list of rules and practices that set its parameters, Kosher cuisine will never be more than a microcosm of global cuisine.
So upon hearing that we, as a class, were going to take a tour exploring just that, global cuisine, I didn’t know what to expect. I was scared that I wouldn’t like what was being handed out because of the palate I grew up on or that other people would express jubilance about food items I’d simply never heard of.
I felt like an outsider and it was starting to make me antsy.
But, then I actually went on the tour. I tried the food like everybody else. And, despite my preconceptions, I was delightfully surprised by what I was biting into. But, in all honesty, what had me the most surprised was that my classmates were too.
I grew up in a such an extreme example of “menu limitation” that I hadn’t stopped to consider that everyone, to some degree, had experienced the same thing.
Whether it’s because you mainly eat at places in your neighborhood or because you gravitate towards meals you’d had in the past, or simply because you didn’t bother or hadn’t got around to trying a dish, everybody’s got tons of food left to try.
To me, the fact that anybody could experience the sensation of trying a new food was a weirdly reassuring thought. Why? Because it got me to stop second-guessing myself. See, they’ll always be room for improvement when it’s come to our “edible education”, regardless of where we’ve come from. And realizing the universality of that no longer made me feel like an outsider, it made me feel comfortable in a neighborhood full of food I’d never seen before.
Questions:
- What are some ways you think your upbringing or current neighborhood affects what you eat on a week-to-week basis?
- Do you have prejudices against specific foods (Other than the fact that you simply don’t like something)? If so, why?
- What are some ways college students can branch out when it comes to cuisine?
