Hi. First time, long time. I was at a Passover seder last night with some dear family friends, and for the main course they heated up for the children Kosher for Passover chicken nuggets which they had purchased from the supermarket. Intrigued (and somewhat suspicious), I looked at the bag afterwards and these were not, in fact, Kosher for Passover but just plain Kosher nuggets. (A Google search indicates that the company makes a K for P matzoh meal-breaded nugget, but this was not that.)
Two questions: should I have said something to my friends, who are not that religious? (I didn't.) And if I had realized this issue before the children were served should I have said anything? Ex ante, I'd prefer that my children at least try to keep Passover, but there'd be no way to tell them not to eat the chicken without leading to them complaining loudly and our hosts finding out why. Was it possible to be a good guest and a good Jew?
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
FOR THE ALOTT5MA HOLIDAYS OF LIBERATION DESK: A question from the email that maybe we should answer?
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I don't know if the Catholic Church was following Jewish precedent or making new law, but even back when it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays during Lent, it was okay to have a hot dog at a Protestant's house. (Although I'm not sure if you had to forget that it was a Friday in Lent first.)
ReplyDeleteI think this was the right approach. To my mind, when it comes to certain aspects of religion, intention is more important than accuracy if you can't have both. For example, I'd think it would be better to try and keep Passover, but fail because of confusing K and K for P, than it would be to not care about keeping Passover, but eat only K for P chicken nuggest because they turned out to be delicious. I'm more of a spirit of the law than a spirit of the law type of guy.
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing the hosts intended to provide food that the children would like that was kosher for passover, and their mistake was an honest one. Calling them out for their mistake wouldn't really have solved the problem, and instead would likely have embarrassed people who (I assume) went to a lot of effort to host a seder, which isn't the easiest thing to do.
I think that once you accept an invitation to let someone else host an event for you (and they clearly try to do it right), etiquette requires that you forfeit the right to complain to the hosts. Perhaps the best way to handle this in the future is to ask beforehand what they plan on serving, so you can avoid the problem (as someone with a food allergy, I learned to do this after a couple of awkward dinners).
Just another example of why ignorance is bliss. FWIW, my nine-year-old son has announced his intent to sort of keep Passover: He won't eat any actual bread, but he'll eat food with bread in it (pizza, chicken nuggets, etc.). With his eating habits, being stricter than that would turn Passover into Yom Kippur for him; he's essentially be fasting for eight days.
ReplyDeleteToo early for me to type well (b/c clearly I can babble out some volume), because I meant the second "spirit of the law" in my first paragraph to read "letter of the law"
ReplyDeleteI agree with this, but with one caveat. If you think that the hosts were getting K for P nuggets purely for the benefit of others (i.e. that they don't themselves care at all), then there's nothing more to do. BUT, if you think they do care on their own, then a very soft call or email saying "Hey, no problem at all on our end, but just for future reference, I thought you'd want to know...." might be in order. If it were me, I'd probably emphasize 5 or 6 times that I wasn't complaining, wasn't upset, etc. etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm just going to betray my ignorance - what's the difference between Kosher for Passover and Kosher? I was opening my new bottle of orange juice the other day and noticed the "freshness seal" was marked as "Kosher for Passover"? I never thought about orange juice being kosher or not kosher, and my ignorant-Protestant self thought that "Kosher for Passover" was a marketing ploy, not knowing it was a real thing.
ReplyDeleteClearly, the answer is they should have been eating brisket.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Russ's caveat. Another caveat might be that you have more leeway to point stuff like this out with family than you would with friends. It all depends on the nature of the relationship. I have a close relationship with the relatives with whom I had seder last night, and they absolutely would care about this, so I'd have pointed it out in a lighthearted way.
ReplyDeleteLiving in NYC, you learn these things--it's primarily on bread/flour related items--regular kosher generally poses no particular restrictions on bread or flour, but to be KFP, all flour must be unleavened, which means chicken nuggets should be breaded with Matzoh, sandwiches with bread other than Matzoh are off limits, and most notably, high-fructose corn-syrup is out. In certain neighborhoods in NYC, Coke sells KFP Coke, which is made with real sugar rather than HFCS, and KFP Coke is sought out not just by observant Jews, but by the (large) cult of "real sugar" Coke.
ReplyDeleteWell, now I'm curious what type of sweetener something calling itself "Simply Orange" is using in its OJ. I usually check for HFCS in drinks and didn't remember it having any.
ReplyDeleteToo bad I gave up Coke for Lent...I love me some kosher Coke.
ReplyDeleteEven products that do not contain any forbidden ingredients still need to be certified K for P. It means they were made in a way that that did not come in contact with anything that is not K for P.
ReplyDeleteOnce Lent is over, go to Hill Country in Chelsea. They sell Mexican Coke (same basic product as KFP coke).
ReplyDeleteI'm not Jewish, so nobody who is Jewish should take my advice about anything Jewish. Yet I cannot resist saying that people's choices about how observant to be, no matter what the religion, are inherently personal. One whose family has chosen to eat only food that is kosher for passover has an absolute right to prohibit one's children from eating the nuggets. In this situation, that is almost certain to result in some (presumably polite, but unpleasant) conflict, and there's really no way around it. So one must choose whether to care more about observing the Judiaic boundaries one has adopted or observing the optimal social graces (note that in my opinion this is not the same thing as "good Jew vs. good guest," but then again I'm not Jewish, so what do I know?). Nobody has a right to answer this question except the person asking it, though I'm sure there are plenty of people who subscribe to one of the two types of orthodoxy in play here (Jewish and etiquette) who will disagree with that statement.
ReplyDeleteHaving said all that, the direct question of whether to tell the other family depends upon what one thinks they intended. If they intended to eat only kosher-for-passover nuggets, then you should tell them, so that they can choose for themselves whether to stick to their guns or give up in the face of superior firepower (the kids' ability to ruin the seder with whining). If their intentions are unclear, then I wouldn't tell them directly (even if they may find out from the kids). There is a parent at our extremely reform preschool who makes it a point to complain or point out passive-aggressively whenever somebody is doing something that does not conform to her standards of observance, getting in fights if people order sausage pizza at a school-affiliated party or sending email blasts to hint that everybody in the class should quit their saturday-game tee-ball leagues and find (or found) a sunday-game tee-ball league. She has every right to choose what restrictions to observe (and I mean that -- unlike some of the other pre-school parents, I think it is wrong to criticize her for selective observance, because don't we all?). But leave me, a non-Jew, out of it. Because my point, as I said at the beginning of this rant, is that the choice of what restrictions to observe is inherently personal. I choose to observe none; she chooses to observe some; and it is possible that our commenter's hosts choose to observe the rule that adults eat only kosher-for-passover while simultaneously allowing the kids to observe a somewhat more relaxed version of that. Directly pointing it out to them might come across as telling them that they're doing it wrong.
I think if you are eating at someone else's house, and you know they are not as observant, than you may want to check in advance on what the menu would be for the evening. The children at our seder had what we were having. There was no "kids meal" and I don't think there should be.
ReplyDeleteThat being said I disagreed with Antonia (I believe said this on Top Chef All Stars) that she very much disliked (not direct quote, I think it was much harsher) kids menus. She had a real disdain for serving children crap. I agree that we shouldn't dumb down children's food just because they are children, but on the other hand, do we need to be serving them Foie Gras? I think that there should be children's menus, but maybe smaller portion of adult items that kids would like. Sorry, didn't mean to go off on a tangent, but I thought this was affiliated with the topic.
I went to a restaurant once that had a traditional kid's menu (chicken fingers, mac and cheese, mini-burgers, pizza), but that ALSO said it would prepare any regular menu item as a half portion for half-price. I loved that restaurant. My kids get very bored with the kids' menus, and yet are not big enough for an adult portion. We can sometimes entice them to split an adult portion of something (they are twins), but they (of course) don't always want the same thing. I still don't get why more restaurants don't offer this.
ReplyDeleteI think you let it go. If the hosts were religious enough to mind that their kids were eating it, they would have known that the box has to say "Kosher for Passover," not just "Kosher." In the moment, I think you just let your kids eat it and figure you're keeping the spirit of Passover, because isn't one of the most important laws in Judaism something about not embarrassing other people? And I can't imagine that "Sorry honey, but you can't have what your friends are having because we are good Jews and don't eat that" would go over very well.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I've come to like Passover a lot more since I adopted the "eat a piece of matzah every day during Passover with your regular food" approach.
It sounds like even if they're not observant, they were trying to make a good faith attempt at keeping Passover (which is how I am, for about five days anyway). In that vein, I think it might have been appropriate to say something if you had noticed it ahead of time, but there's no sense in embarrassing them now.
ReplyDeleteAnd sometimes, the holiday aside, you have to just deal. My mother's family is from a small town in Georgia, and my grandmother always used to be in charge of putting on the community Seder for the approximately 20 Jewish familes that lived there. One year, they decided to hold it at a local hotel, and my grandmother gave them her recipes to follow. It was only right before the Seder that they realized that the hotel had decided that the matzoh ball soup and the baked chicken had come out too bland, so they added a ham hock to the soup and fried the chicken. But they all just ate it anyway, because what else could they do? You always want to make a good faith attempt to keep the traditions, but sometimes you just can't, and it's the thought that counts.
On a somewhat related note... my kids school (a Catholic school) is putting on a Seder meal, which I thought was great - we're Catholic, but I'm all for them learning about other faiths. I've seen the word Seder in print, but because I don't know many Jewish people, I've never heard the word out loud (gasp!) How is it pronounced?
ReplyDeleteSAY-dur. Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteyou probably don't want all the bizarre details on all this stuff, but suffice it to say that there is no more anal retentive set of people in the world than kosher-keeping Jews (I'm one of them) and we are at our mostanal retentive at Passover. No leavening can come anywhere near anything that you use on Passover, and it's not just leavening - there's a whole mess of stuff that's a problem. With the OJ, it probably has to do with teh factory where it is processed - if anything is processed in the same factory that has leavening in it, there would be a problem, and even if the machines were, say, greased with some sort of oil that came from a fobidden plant, there could be a problem. There are certain things that do not have to be specially marked because the places that make it never come into contact with leavning - extra virgin olive oil, for example, need not get special certification because the rabbis have determined there is no danger of contamination due to the already-stringent regulations around calling it "extra-virgin."
ReplyDeleteMany people will go ahead and use OJ for Passover so long as the only ingredient is "oranges" or "orange juice," so long as it is certified kosher in the first place. There are a lot of products like that. The rabinnincal authorities put out lists every year of what you can and cannot buy without special certification, and this year fresh OJ wasn't on it, but FCOJ was, so long as OJ was the only ingredient.
Just so people know, it's not always so obvious what's plain-kosher and what's Kosher-for-Passover. I'm guessing your hosts bought the Of Tov brand of nuggets, and they make both kinds. The packaging is disturbingly similar, and it would be extremely easy for either the supermarket to stick an errant not-for-passover bag of them in the freezer case with the passover ones, or for someone who wasn't as familiar with a given store's wares to grab from the wrong freezer case. The store where I get most of my Passover stuff has signs up all over the Passover section telling people to check all their purchases to make sure they are K-for-P for exactly this reason - it's so easy for a package of Philly cream cheese that isn't k-for-p to end up mixed in with the ones that are.
ReplyDeleteThis is a long-winded way of saying that I dont' think you can assume that the host is not observant because observant people would notice such a thing. I've made this mistake more than once, thankfully always noticing it before screwing up my dishes or serving anything to guests, but it's only a matter of time before I go that far.
What would I do? Depends on the host. I tend to agree with Russ. If you think they don't particularly care and were doing it for you, then you just decide what you want to do about your own kids and move on. If you think they're trying to observe and made a mistake, then I would tell them in as nice a way as possible. If this happened in my house, I would absolutely want to know, preferably before heating them up on my Passover pans and making them no longer suitable for Passover. And I would thank you for telling me. But it's going to depend a great deal on who your host is and how well you know them.
I'm also going to go with Andrea here - if I did not intend to tell my hosts (as noted above), I'd let the kids eat them, though wouldn't eat them myself. I believe that it's a much worse sin to embarass your host than to let your kids violate Passover, but that's my own personal creed. It's not a specifically Jewish rule, but I take my cue from a number of rabbis I know who eat in their congregants' homes without asking any questions about their kosher observance because allowing their congregants to do the mitzvah of welcoming guests is much more important to them than possible minor violations of the kosher laws.
Happy Passover everyone!
They sell Mexican Coke all over Williamsburg, which is deadly to me. They even sell it in the delis. It's the hipster drink but I will claim I discovered it first.
ReplyDelete