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Tapping into New York concerns over
non-kosher water
HOW difficult can it be to eat kosher? Just about impossible
in New York, where microscopic shellfish have been discovered
in the tap water.
I used to think I could eat just about anywhere, except the
Australian rainforest, and be sure of keeping kosher, because
I'm a dedicated veggie.
Unless someone is tantalising my tastebuds with a plate of
delicious wichetty grubs and stick insects, and pledging to
pick up the tab with a sizeable payment to the charity of
my choice, I am strictly a fruit-and-veg muncher.
There's no danger that I'll guzzle a crab pate sandwich after
mistaking it for goose liver paste, or wolf a pork-and-pineapple
pizza because the waitress wasn't listening when I ordered
lamb medallions.
(Just writing that sentence has left me feeling queasy).
I'm a veggie because I think it's unnecessary to kill animals,
though there's an added celebrity bonus: no one ever got overweight
in a greengrocer's. And I'm far from being the only Jew who,
accustomed to a lifetime of regulations about what I can't
eat, finds it natural to be vegetarian.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize in 1979, compared
man's oppression and slaughter of non-human creatures to Hitler's
policies of extermination.
''Man is a Nazi to animals,'' he said. Singer, by the way,
is a writer who has been almost destroyed by the movies.
Most novelists dream of selling an option on the stories
to a Hollywood mogul and being catapulted onto the Rich List,
but four years after Singer won literature's greatest award,
his novel Yentl was filmed with Barbra Streisand.
It didn't matter that IBS hated the result: the point is,
so did everyone else. It was the most heavily panned movie
for years, until Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez collided in
Gigli and destroyed both their acting careers.
Now, British publishers don't even bother to keep all of
Singer's work in print. It's enough to make you choke. And
if you're choking in New York, you can no longer clear your
throat with a glass of water unless it has been filtered.
Orthodox restaurants and bakeries are fuming, though that's
illegal too in New York, where smoking in public places is
prohibited.
The problem is too small to see with the naked eye: the copepod,
a type of crustacean, which simply means it's a microbe with
its skeleton on the outside.
They infest the water, and the city authorities have no intention
of acting to eradicate them: the reservoirs need them to stay
clean. And anyway, what are the Department from Environmental
Protection's inspectors expected to do: scoop them out with
a pin, like winkles?
The sole solution is to filter the water minutely, and that
can only be done by the consumer - the city's entire water
supply cannot be dripped through a rack of paper discs.
It is, as Rabbi Abraham Zimmerman of the Satmar sect remarked,
a small hardship - unless you're a water filter salesman,
in which case it's probably the best thing to hit your business
since the meltdown at Three Mile Island.
(Note to pedantic readers: that previous line was a heavy-handed
attempt at a joke, since the editor says my column could do
with more of them. I am in fact aware that water filters do
not remove uranium waste from tap water, and I cannot be held
legally responsible by any reader who attempts to contain
a nuclear waste overflow with paper. On the positive side,
radiation probably wipes out copepods faster than neat bleach.)
What I don't want to know is if the tap water in my home
is infested with invisible crustaceans. Thames Water might
be pumping a billion infinitesimal lobsters through my pipes
every time I wash the dishes, but I want to remain ignorant.
What if there are copepods in the raindrops? In the dew,
and the morning mist? I feel strongly that there should be
a cut-off point with crustaceans: if you can drink them or
breath them and not notice, they're kosher.
They only count when they've got claws that can have your
finger off, and when Gordon Ramsay can pick the ****ers up
by their ****ing tails and fling them in a saucepan of ****ing
hot water.
More to the point, they should cease to be kosher when they're
big enough to go off. Shellfish and pork can be lethal when
they're less than fresh - though, strangely, it's the invisible
bacteria multiplying in the meat that can kill us, and not
the meat itself.
Logically, it's the bacteria that are deadly, so perhaps
the New Yorkers are right to declare copepods non-kosher.
And morally, we've been killing animals for thousands of
years, so perhaps it's time that the animals started to hit
back.
Until pigs have evolved sufficiently to sit on Truth and
Reconciliation Commissions, haven't they earned the right
to cause indiscriminate slaughter among the human population?
I'm going to have a glass of wine and mull it over. Kosher
wine, of course: no gelatin or egg white or other animal products
permitted in the production process. Veggie as well as kosher,
in other words.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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