People often summarize Jewish holidays as: they tried to kill us, they didn’t, let’s eat! I’m sure that makes for some interesting relationships to food. As someone that didn’t grow up Jewish, though, I can’t use that as an explanation for my fraught relationship with food. Instead, my relationship with food has a lot to do with being trans or, more specifically, being raised as an overweight girl child.
My mother is both overweight and mentally unwell. You may be unsurprised to learn that her food issues became mine. When my mom went on a diet, I was put on it, too. Her diets featured extreme restriction, lack of any kind of balance, and return to junk food as soon as they finished. Most notably, this featured me at age 10 joining her on the cabbage soup diet. For the lucky folks unfamiliar, this featured exclusively eating a broth-based cabbage soup for days/weeks at a time. It also included diets like the Atkins, based on removing food groups with little-to-no focus on adding things in (like vegetables!).
This impacted me in a couple of ways. First, these kinds of diets are fueled by self-hatred. Why else would you choose to eat nothing but cabbage soup (trust me, it’s not good soup)? Those diets are a punishment for being fat. It also kicks in when the diet inevitably fails. The failure isn’t because the diet was wrong- it’s your failure of will and being a bad person because you’re fat. It also made a healthy diet–especially one designed to lose weight–almost impossible, even as an adult. I get obsessive about calorie counting. I restrict too much, which leads to both a lot of sweets later and dropping the diet quickly. Like I did throughout childhood and adolescence, I skip meals. I avoid things like intermittent fasting, even though it has evidence, because all of my food baggage makes that ripe for an eating disorder.
How can I resolve this?
I don’t know yet if this is the answer, but I think some of the larger principles of kashrut can help with this. Keeping kosher, especially at home, requires a lot of self-control. Yesterday, for example, I ended up not making olive bread because I couldn’t find the right olives with a hekhsher. This most clearly impacts what processed foods I eat because most don’t carry a hekhsher. Homemade foods (almost always) have less calories than processed food and the extra work puts a time barrier between a feeling and satisfying it with food. Applying more of that discipline to how I eat outside of the home makes the idea of not eating out a kashrut issue. A practice I’m going to seriously consider is not eating out except for vegetarian and/or hekhshered restaurants (prior to that, was eating vegetarian in any restaurant). That cuts out all of my stress-eating- no more Domino’s, no more soups and mac from Bread Co., no more Jimmy John’s. Instead of becoming a restriction, it becomes a living out of values. If I wouldn’t eat it on my plates at home, should I really be eating it out? Maybe not.
Healthful eating can also be part of kashrut practice. In fact, the religious norms for rabbinical students at JTS explicitly define it as such: “A diet lacking in moderation is problematic, no matter what heksher appears on the wrapper.” I’m curious to see how this will work, but at least in concept it seems like a great way to remove self-hatred and punishment from the equation. It similarly makes the idea of self-love, often treated as essential for a healthy diet, irrelevant. Instead, it’s doing a mitzvah. That same document cites hazards to health as being a larger transgression than other prohibitions. That’s probably more about breaking Shabbat regulations to save a life than it is about eating more leafy greens, but I’ll take it.
Knowing what a healthy, balanced diet looks like has never been the problem, at least not as an adult. My challenges are doing things in moderation, maintaining them as a lifestyle, and not basing it all in self-hatred. Although, of course, I’m hoping for weight loss from these changes, making it about kashrut makes weight loss an added benefit, not the goal. It becomes doing this because God (to the limited extent we can understand what God wants of us) wants me to do this. We’ll see how it goes.
Queering Judaism 