Not Just Pizza

Mozzarella That Stretches for Decades

It’s a warm July Saturday night. I’m walking blocks of Brooklyn eateries and develop a pining for pizza. I go into a classic NY joint – busy, hot, of pungent, delicious, oily tinged smells, with brusque, efficient counter men. I ask for a plain slice to go and walk home, the plated pizza slice in its bag warming my cupped hand.

Saturday night paired with pizza is nostalgic residue from my parenting days. When with many growing kids, Saturday night was a challenge. It was after the religious Sabbath - of synagogue, ritual long meals, a long afternoon with no electronics – so it was of either reading, studying, talking, running around, bickering, sleeping, or walking. With the awareness that the world parties on Saturday night, and the afternoon meal digested long ago, the teenagers might itch to “go out with their friends” which could lead by temptation seen from others, to, god-forbid, drugs, sex, clubs, or movies, none of which was on the allowed activity menu for a religious person.

So, early on, as a way to control and orient towards kosher activities, as parents we aimed to create a fun environment at home – the kids could invite friends or relatives and play board games like Scrabble, Snatch, Pictionary and we’d provide the setting and participate with pizza, soda and fries. After doing that for years, pizza became an expected body and mind treat, with associated feelings of fun with close ones.

Thus, often on a Saturday night even decades later, and even with no family to tend and the prior afternoon’s activity not being limited in any way, there nevertheless might from nowhere rise a hankering for pizza from my endorphin-desiring innards.

This pizza shop, though, was a non-kosher establishment. Non-kosher is a loaded phrase. Kosher means of ingredients allowed per religious dietary constraints, whose degrees of direct connection to biblical mandate varies. There’s what’s cryptically written in the bible. Then there’s what Rabbis extrapolated from the words to be divine intent. Then there are additional restrictions tacked on to prevent people from even accidentally ingesting actual non-kosher stuff. And now there are commercial establishments, creating kosher “certification” so that a kosher-seeking consumer need not research ingredients a restaurant uses or are in a packaged grocery store item.

This was several years after marital divorce and physical departure from the religious community and way of life, and decades after my shifted perspective on the arbitrary aspect of religious constraints. Yet, that it was a non-kosher eatery, was still right there on my awareness radar just as much as the warm, wafting, yeasty, cheesy smell.

Technically there was probably nothing non-kosher about the pizza. Cheese, flour, water, yeast, tomato paste, oil and spices are all fundamentally kosher. But rabbis long ago added restrictions. All milk product and by-product must be supervised from when the milk leaves the cow’s udder until the finished product is presented for sale to ensure no non-kosher animal’s milk, like a pig’s, was included in its production. And religious folks now only eat at a kosher place – a food establishment that has documented certification by a kosher certifying company that the place is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling kosher, deferring personal responsibility for determining what they may eat to someone else.

Rabbis also decided that god forbids pizza even if its ingredients are inherently kosher, if it is warmed in the same oven as pepperoni pizza. Firstly, because the pepperoni might not be kosher (and we can spend three paragraphs explaining what might constitute kosher or non-kosher pepperoni). And even if it was kosher pepperoni, no meat product may be baked together with dairy product (the why, would take another three paragraphs). This pizza shop had pepperoni too.

So, the place wasn’t commercially certified kosher, and certainly wouldn’t meet any rabbinical kosher standard. While I was intellectually divorced from the concept of kosher, I was still aware of all its nuances and which still evoked a forbidden feeling, accompanied by a deeply embedded fear whose residue still remained, about the consequences of violating a divine law. Whatever rabbis tacked on as forbidden, was considered divine law.

I got home, enjoyed the pizza, washing it down with a small can of ice-cold Coke – an indulgence I do often with pizza, imagining it acts as a pleasurable solvent to cut through and break down pizza’s savory, umami-rich, heavy fattiness.

But while eating and thereafter, there was a subtle fear – will I get food poisoning? A stomach ache? As divine punishment or simply as natural reaction and rejection from my conditioned-as-Jewish body to non-kosher food? This chatter wood-pecked away while academically and talmudically I knew there was probably no real non-kosher product in the pizza.

I enjoyed the indulgence, but it was laced with the bitter undercurrent twinge of the non-kosherness of the experience, which lingered even the next morning – when reading news of some country leader experiencing food poisoning, immediately triggering a psychosomatic, hyper-empathetic stomach ache. Thankfully it lasted only a few moments.

The awareness and phantom limb of ‘forbidden’ things, and the accompanying fear of consequence, remain. I internally talk it down and away. The intensity of these feelings diminishes with accumulated experiences that don’t net me some ‘punishment.’

But they’re still here, like a campfire whose smoky smell lingers long after leaving the campsite.