eating, ritually and otherwise

I wrote part of this post earlier this weekend, but when I clicked Save, the whole thing was lost and unrecoverable. Argh!! Then I had to leave the house, so this is my second attempt, several days later.


Last week was bookended by two important meals and a meal that had gone missing in action. We've also been struggling with what to feed the household animals.


On Monday night, we celebrated Passover at the home of a friend where we've celebrated for many years running. She's a wonderful cook, but not very big on ceremony. We traditionally work through the first half of an incredibly minimalist Haggadah until we get to the long-awaited passage, "We eat the festive meal" and then we dine royally.

After dinner, there's a search for the Afikomen and eating of dessert. Everyone rushes up from the table at once, we stand around talking a while longer, and then we all go home without finishing part deux of the seder.

Each year, our hostess does loads of research for recipes, buys huge quantities of eggs -- she bought four dozen this year -- and cooks for days leading up to the event. She gathers a fascinating collection of friends, and conversations are always lively and enlightening.


Spiritually, this friend's seder used to be balanced by Daniel's, at which we had many former divinity students, more Hagaddahs than people, each Haggadah different, and long discussions about various approaches to telling the story and celebrating the holiday.

Now, much as I enjoy our hostess' celebrations, I always feel a longing for the other half and know that we'll never experience it again. This is a good time to practice enoughness, gratitude for what we do have.


Another friend has started experimenting with a raw food (also called "Living Food") diet, which is much as it sounds, with the added restriction of being entirely vegan (thankfully). It seems to be the exact opposite of Macrobiotics, in which everything is completely cooked, even the salt. My friend decided to have a raw food dinner and asked me to help out.

So on Friday, I went to her house, food processor in tow. In the morning we made about five dishes. I took a break, went swimming, did some other work. Then I went back for another three hours, during which we created a few more dishes and did final preparations. My friend had also been working for the previous week, making food in her dehydrator. Apparently, food still counts as raw if it's only been taken up to 105 degrees.

Then the dinner party happened. There were nine of us, all of whom I'd met previously. The food was quite good and we had of course prepared way too much. Conversation was fun, and we talked way into the evening. Finally, when we were full and I was very very tired, we left.

Robert and I both had -er- digestive disturbances in the middle of the night. This is apparently not a diet that you should switch to all at once. I think it takes a while to learn to process an all-raw meal. And I don't think I could switch entirely to it anyways. I like brown rice too much for one thing, and I also like eating warm food. Nonetheless, it was a fun and wonderful experiment and a great evening.


There have been disturbances also in the pet food world, and there's been a huge recall of pet food over the last month. In fact, this topic came up for discussion at Friday's dinner party because we're all struggling with what to feed our pets.

As the story stands now, many pet food sellers contract to one manufacturer to produce one line of wet food. The manufacturer recently switched suppliers of one small component of the food they produce, wheat gluten, which is used as a thickener. The new wheat gluten apparently contains some awful poison that causes kidney failure in immune-weakened animals.

The problem affects at least 43 brands of cat food and 54 brands of dog food. And one of those brands is what I've been feeding my cats for their evening treat. As the story unfolded, the scope of the problem seems to have expanded and shifted so it's been hard to get a handle on the situation. But I was finally able to return all the remaining food I had on hand.

I've continued to feed the cats their high-end dry food, which is what they mostly eat. I did try some other high-end wet foods not manufactured at the suspect factory and the cats just turned up their noses. So now at night, they're getting food similar to what they were eating, except it's from the grocery store, and I'm sure my vet would ask me why I'm feeding my cats junk food. Except this is what they'll eat (barely, they probably still miss the food I took away), so we're sticking with it.

It's kind of scary to have an entire food supply tainted. And it makes me even more aware of how easily something like this could happen in the human food chain too. With all the consolidation that goes on at companies, it's quite possible that the selections we make in our own food aren't all that different from the items we leave behind on the grocery store shelves.

Eating "closer to the earth" does solve some of this problem. I've long been moving closer to that goal for the household humans, but the cats will continue to eat manufactured food for now.