Lois Leveen is a writer, performer, and recovering academic who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in/on B*tch magazine, Interfaith Family, the Oregon Literary Review, and LiveWire radio. She is currently at work on the world's first memoir about a Jew from New York visiting Mary's Harbour, a town of 400 in Labrador. You can read her weeklyish humor blog at http://macaronimaniac.blogspot.com
Oh readers! What an exciting time for a Yenta! My first Shmethicist column got a shout out in The Forward. And readers’ questions are pouring in.
So I thought I’d start with the spiciest query . . . and I don’t mean the one about habaneros versus jalapeños. Read more »
It’s a Jewish food blog, so, nu, here’s a little good old-fashioned Borscht belt humor:
Q: What are the two things Jews know?
A: Suffering, and where to find good Chinese food.
Okay, so maybe “good” shouldn’t be used to modify Borscht belt humor. I’ve known that joke for 20 years, and who knows how old it was when I first heard it. It must be further past the expiry date than that container of organic non-fat sour cream you’ve got pushed way back in the corner of your fridge.
So here’s an always-fresh corollary:
Q: What are the two things Jewish women love?
A: Eating and giving advice.
Thus is born a new The Jew & The Carrot feature, “The Shmethicist” - a moral nosh on ethical eating. Readers are hereby invited to send in your ethical food quandaries to shmethicist@jcarrot.org. Because why should Randy Cohen have all the fun?
Since you didn’t know I existed until just now, I’ve taken the shmethically questionable route of making up our first reader query, just so I had something to answer.
Below the jump: The Shmethicist’s take on Halloween candy…
Digest, Grocery, Humor, Jewish Culture, Laugh Out Loud Posts, NYTimes, News, Opinion, Rant!, Sustainability
Judging from some recent food journalism, using spurious logic to rationalize the choice not to eat ethically is as easy as slathering a mound of Jif Creamy onto a slice of Wonder Bread.
For example, Portland, Oregon is a great city for green living. Maybe that’s why the Oregonian, our newspaper, recently started a weekly green living column — although with dubious results. The inaugural piece was about how to not feel guilty when you *don’t* buy organic. The gist of the article was that as long as you avoid the “Dirty Dozen” – the twelve foods most contaminated with pesticides — you’re a-okay. As columnist Shelby Wood giddily reported:
With the Dirty Dozen in mind, I paid the $1 premium for organic spinach (No. 11 on the Environmental Working Group’s list) at the grocery last week. But I saved $1 on conventional broccoli (No. 35) and 20 cents a pound on bananas (No. 37). After all, I’ve been eating those for 34 years. And I’m not dead yet.
Great job, Shelby. Perhaps you’d like to celebrate by investing that $1.20 you saved on some low-tar cigarettes.
