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.

It’s a familiar legend – whether it’s the Golem or Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (the latter perhaps inspired by tales of the former) – what we arrogantly create comes back to haunt us. America’s monster might turn out to be one that we encounter in its most powerful form each Halloween: corn. Not the sweet, buttery kind that we get from our CSA in July. The kind that industrial-strength petro-chemicals and lobbyist-induced grain subsidies have produced in quantities unfathomable even fifty years ago. As Michael Pollan noted in Omnivore’s dilemma, which so eloquently sounded the clarion call for the dangers of corn, much of this crop has been turned into food additives that are so commonplace that if we’re eating any type of processed food, chances are we’re eating corn, even if we don’t even know it!