pensnest | (no subject)

Lance Bass's Twitter no longer appears to work. Anyone know why? He didn't Tweet a lot but was big with the retweets.

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I don't know if anyone reading this journal is Jewish, but with any luck there will be someone. I have a query, and I really don't know how to search for the answer.

See, last night as I lay abed in my regular insomniac condition, I noticed that in the fic I am painfully prodding towards a close, I have my Christian-background character feeding my Jewish-background character something that includes shrimp.

It's RPF. I'm solidly confident that my character's real life counterpart does not keep kosher, but. I wonder if there is a, what can I call it, a hierarchy of reluctance when it comes to eating things that are on the forbidden list? If a person who happily eats pizza with meat stuff on it would balk at eating, um, crab? If someone might be perfectly happy to eat shrimp but be unable to bring himself to touch ham? If there is any kind of consensus on this sort of thing, or not?

Food is such a cultural and specific matter. I am a Christian-background person (also, English) and I am quite certain there will be all kinds of details that I simply don't know. Plus, it will vary so much. In a different incarnation of this character, I had him decline prunes wrapped in bacon on grounds of Prunes, Ew! and be happy to eat pepperoni on pizza (which, as a double fault, may be at the top of the Do Not Want list?). I just hadn't thought very much about it at that point, beyond thinking—wait, Jewish! and having my Christian-background character be embarrassed about offering him something with bacon.

This time, having thought about it, I am wondering. Hierarchy of reluctance seems like a good way of putting it. Also, I'm interested.

It is RPF, and I have no way of knowing what the person in question actually chooses to eat. I don't mind making wrong choices in my fic, but I would prefer not to make thoughtless choices. So, anyone have any advice?

Crossposts: https://pensnest.livejournal.com/649263.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

liv

Hi, Jewish reader here. I think you're right that there is a hierarchy of reluctance (lovely phrase!) among people who aren't especially observant of kosher rules. Can I actually order things in the hierarchy? Hm, eating products that are recognizably pig (eg ham, bacon) is the worst – many culturally Jewish people will avoid obvious pork even if they ignore all other restrictions.

Some people who have specifically thought things through keep a level often described as 'Biblical kosher' which means they avoid everything that comes from forbidden animals but don't care about mixing meat and dairy (eg beef on pizza would be fine, ham on non-dairy pizza would be bad). For those people, shrimp would be negative but probably not as bad as ham.

OTOH, people who don't really care that much about kosher laws but have a sense of Jewish identity may find meat pizza worse than shrimp. They might not be able to articulate why. Basically meat-and-dairy together is sort of more taboo, somehow? Whereas avoiding shellfish feels a lot less like a statement of identity; plenty of Jewish people don't even know that shellfish is forbidden. Shellfish is probably worse than really obscure (by the standards of typical English diet) non-kosher foods, such as kangaroo or rabbit, because non-observant people don't really have any intuitive sense at all of whether an obscure food they hardly ever see on a menu is kosher or not.

Specifically pepperoni pizza is, yes, a double fault. But there are few people who really care about that. People who care and know about the actual laws would certainly avoid pepperoni regardless of whether it's near cheese. They might joke about how pepperoni pizza / bacon cheeseburgers are doubly forbidden, but would never consider eating pepperoni or bacon anyway. People who just have a sense that being Jewish means no pork are likely to think of the meat-and-dairy prohibition as something that only those weird religious freaks bother with. So again, they would avoid pepperoni regardless of whether it's on pizza. Or they wouldn't care and would just eat whatever seems tasty. I wouldn't be completely astounded to find a Jewish person who eats pork products alone but avoids mixing them with cheese, but it doesn't seem like the most likely case. Does that help?

(There are also many people who avoid obvious pig products but don't care about traces of pig, such as sweets with gelatine in. But that doesn't seem relevant to your example.)

From:

pensnest

This is most helpful! Thank you. It sounds as though I could have him avoid all piggy products, and play the rest of it according to what seems reasonable. I thought there would be quite a spectrum.

I've been caught out by vegetarians not wanting sweets with gelatine in, but then, there are more vegetarians in my offline life than Jews (at least, that I'm aware of).

Thanks for your help.

From:

oldtoadwoman

I'm curious enough that I may re-post the question as I know I have a couple of Jewish friends in my Dreamwidth circle.

I've definitely heard the joke about Chinese food being exempt just because Chinese takeout is yummy. And I think there's the general idea that "If I just eat it without asking about the ingredients, it's fine."

I expect this is a personal thing and answers may vary from person to person. I remember watching a TV interview where Isaac Mizrahi (fashion designer who identifies as Jewish culturally but is clearly not very observant) and an observant Jew were talking and Isaac went off on a tangent about bacon being yummy and the other guy looked shocked and Isaac didn't even seem to notice he'd scandalized the other man.

EDIT: passed on the question and got a reply here

Edited (added link) Date: 2020-10-07 03:50 am (UTC)

From:

pensnest

American Chinese food seems to have a different emphasis to British Chinese food (as an aside). Or maybe it's just my family - no Chinese takeaway is complete without sweet and sour something, whether pork or chicken. But when I've seen Chinese mentioned in fanfic, there are different dishes. So I could imagine the 'Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas' deal including, hmm, Crab Rangoon?

It does seem to be very variable, which is just what I'd hoped!

From:

oldtoadwoman

off-topic:

Beef-and-broccoli, cashew chicken, moo goo gai pan, General Tso's chicken, orange chicken, and also sweet-and-sour chicken or pork are all common here. And most Chinese restaurants have pretty long menus with a lot more options than that. (I'd classify General Tso and orange chicken as being kinds of sweet-and-sour, but I may be wrong.) It's also my understanding that Chinese-American food is definitely not authentic to China and is very much a combination of dishes from different parts of China, modified with food and spices more readily available in the U.S. and then often adjusted further to suit the tastes of white customers. (I read a fascinating article recently that also talked about the influence of Polynesian food on Chinese-American restaurants. The article went on to talk about how things got standardized in the 1950s when restaurants would just copy the popular menus of other restaurants.)

I'm curious if the U.K. inherited the Chinese-American menu or adapted its own Chinese-British menu.

In the modern U.S. we are continuing to mix-and-match all things Asian, which probably horrifies purists, but... it's now very common to find Chinese/Japanese/Vietnamese/Thai items all on the same menu, sushi at a Chinese restaurant, pho at a Thai restaurant, et cetera. (I think people who don't know better ask for things and after enough paying customers ask "Why don't you have X?" an enterprising restauranteur just adds it to the menu rather than explain that it's from a completely different country.)

From:

pensnest

My FIL lived in Australia (Tasmania) for a while, and would visit the local Chinese buffet quite happily. It was definitely coloniser-version Chinese food!

When we managed to lure him to Sydney for a long weekend, he came with strict instructions from a friend to have an authentic Chinese meal. We found a place which was thronging with Chinese faces, and had trolleys of food baskets circulating. We had no idea what we were doing but we ate there anyway, and it was *completely* different from what he was expecting. Nothing whatever on the menu that he recognised (except 'rice', probably). He didn't like it. (We had another meal at a teppan yaki (??) restaurant where, unfortunately, we were the first customers of the evening, so the chef concentrated on us. What he needed was a cheerful, extrovert crowd who enjoyed catching their own eggs in their own dishes and their own omelettes in their own mouths... he got us: Me, and two Robinson males. Ahaha.)

I suppose it's probable that most of the UK's Chinese immigrants came via Hong Kong? I don't know if that would make a difference to the resulting food or not, but I expect there are plenty of regional variations in China. And we've had a strong tradition of loving our curries here, obviously due to a long, hm, association with India. I'd guess that the different ethnic compositions of the USA and UK might make a difference in what the customers would like to eat. Wonder if anyone's studied that?

I don't recognise General Tso's Chicken or orange chicken, and I don't *think* I recognise moo goo gai pan (though it has been mentioned in enough fanfics that I recognise the name), so there do seem to be variations on the theme. If I do see it on a menu here I will have to order it.

When I was a child, if my family ordered Chinese food, we all shared all the dishes. When I stayed with a couple in Germany and we went out for a Chinese meal, I was rather disappointed that everyone ordered their own dish and we didn't share. What do you do?

From:

oldtoadwoman

Moo goo gai pan is actually very plain. It's pretty much the most boring option. I don't dislike it and would take a spoonful if it were being passed around the table, but I'd want to leave room for more interesting options. And, yeah, unless it's a fast-food place like Panda Express, Chinese food is always served family-style where everyone gets to try a bit of everything. (Same for Indian restaurants.)

We have the same kind of divide between authentic Mexican food and fake-Mexican and I have to admit that I prefer fake-Mexican. (I've often joked that America's contribution to world cuisine is to take dishes from other cultures and figure out how to make them even more fattening. "This is great, but I bet it would be even better with...more butter, cream sauce, cheese, sugar & cinnamon, deep-fried... some combination thereof.") The most obvious difference between authentic Mexican and fake-Mexican is the cheese. You should walk out of a good fake-Mexican place with melted cheese in your veins.

From:

brandywine28

Adam's a rebel. He'd eat the shrimp. Sexily.

Signed,
Not a Jew, just Opinionated (note the capital 'O'!)

From:

pensnest

I don't think there is a whole lot he doesn't do sexily, really!

From:

frausorge

Yikes Lance! I hope he's ok.

From:

pensnest

Yes! I wonder if he tweeted something that brought a whole bunch of hostility down on his hapless head, or something. His Twitter wasn't terribly informative, but I liked to look in on it sometimes.

From:

turps

You had me worried there that Lance had left Insta too, but he was in stories.

It does make me wonder if he's had some negativity, therefore only posting in places with a limited time to be shown.

From:

pensnest

Twitter did rather seem to be his natural medium, for a while, but then he devolved into just retweeting stuff. I shall amuse myself with his Instagram instead.