What’s Your Kosher?

Truth

*This post originally appeared in The Times of Israel on Oct. 31, 2013

So there I was, in 2008, newly kosher and eating a meal with my vegan friend and trying to get her to understand my confusion regarding her question.  You’re a vegan.  To me, that seems difficult and requires quite a bit of discipline and creativity.  But from her lens, however, veganism was a no-brainer; something that came naturally to her.  At that point in my kosher-keeping journey, I was still craving the occasional cheeseburger so it wasn’t as natural to me as it is now.  We went back and forth on the differences and similarities of keeping both of these diets.  Eventually, the conversation naturally flowed to the challenges of starting a new diet; expense, limitations, family judgement, trying to get creative with cooking, etc., when it hit me.  Vegan is her kosher.

Kosher used to be exotic.  Having a specialized diet that required shopping at specialty grocery stores, declining dinner invitations to certain restaurants or other people’s homes due to dietary issues and budgeting to afford diet-specific items was considered strange and even too much work to consider.  But in 2013, everybody’s got their kosher.  With the rise of diets including, but not limited to, gluten-free, grain-free, vegan, paleo, strictly organic and/or only eating unpastruerized dairy products, etc., kosher just isn’t that strange anymore and I gotta say, I am a little relieved.  Heck, at this point, kosher is old news. So you can’t cook meat and milk together?  Big deal. Try going sugar-free, gluten-free and paleo.

Continuing reading at The Times of Israel