(no subject)

[pensnest]

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?

Comments

[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.)

[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.