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Fast Food Rebellion

by · September 12th, 2008
Cooking, D'var Torah, Food Writing, Jewish Culture, Judaism, Spirituality, The Carrot, The Jew

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While reading the opening portion of this week’s Parasha, the Rabbi in shul saw me and said, “You can’t be zolel ve’soveh (approx: gluttonous) on Wolfgang Puck cuisine.” This statement promptly blew my mind. Here’s why.

The statement in question comes from the passage in the Torah about the rebellious son, who, if certain conditions are met, is to be seen as completely incorrigible and must be put to death by the community. One of these conditions is that the child must eat and drink copious amounts of food in a gluttonous manner in a public area and this activity must be decried by the community leadership. According to the rabbinic authorities, the money used to purchase the food must have been stolen from his parents and he must commit this act in front of his parents’ home. Not easy to achieve.

All this speaks to the idea that a child that is this rebellious at this early an age, will have no chance of becoming better, and that it is better to nip this in the bud before the child influences others. The commentators and philosophers struggle with this idea that there are people who are beyond the possibility of ever doing teshuvah and that we are permitted to kill someone for his future actions.

Many believe – and I count myself among them – that this halacha is a hypothetical construct designed to make us aware of the importance of raising our youth in the proper manner. To bolster this argument I would point out exactly how difficult it is to actually consider someone to be a rebellious son, and that the hoops that must be jumped through are fairly intricate. To add to the above example, the child must be between thirteen and three months and thirteen and six months and must have exhibited rebellious behavior for a significant time. Nevertheless the relevant point here is that being a glutton at such an early age is not a good thing.

About a year ago I started working for the first Kosher Wolfgang Puck outpost, at the Spertus Institute in Chicago. We have a cafe, but our main business is in high-end catering. I have learned quite a bit under Chef Laura Frankel, and I am learning about how most of our food gets prepared. One of the biggest lessons I am learning first hand is how much of a difference there is between fast food, and food lovingly prepared by people who care about how they feed their friends and clients.

This is where the lesson came home for me. With so many of our youth eating junk foods at a higher rate than ever, does this potentially pose a risk for our communities to be raising rebellious children? Thinking about this gave me the necessary connection between how we feed our society and how it functions. A child who has never been served a meal prepared by people who care for her may never understand how challenging it is to sustain a family with care and dignity. Children pick up on the fact that dinner came from a box, or was paid for with pocket change at a fast food joint. The youth whose parent comes home from a day of work and then gets to making real dinner served on real plates with a whole family together has no chance of ever rebelling in this manner.

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5 Responses to “Fast Food Rebellion”

  1. Rabbi Shmuel Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 10:52 am

    Avi – again you hit it on the head (it’s my ba mitzva parsha as well so I have a deeper nexus to it)

    but you highlight the tension between a system that wants to carry an ideal “on the books” but then makes it virtually impossible on a practical level to enforce by setting the bar and burden of proof so high.

    But you’re spot on with the link between biblical gluttony and some of the fast food epidemics we have today (I saw on yahoo a guy ate 23,000 whoppers!)

    But I digree – shabbos is almost here and there are veggies to harvest from the garden – there’ll be butternut squash soup, basil and tomatoes, Israeli cuke salad (and did I mention pesto?) have a good shabbos – eat well and eat slowly

  2. Leah Koenig Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am

    Here’s the story Rabbi Shmuel mentioned about the 23,000 Big Macs. Life long indigestion, anyone?

    http://news.aol.com/article/ma.....acs/166242

  3. Debra Waldoks Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

    Thank you for this great dvar torah! Working parents always need dinnertime encouragement after a day of work. A lot of research supports “family dinners” as a way to deter rebellious activities.

    There is actually a lot written about “achillah gassah” or overeating in the Talmud.

    To quote from a Jewess blog post that I wrote:
    “There is a model in the Talmud of an inappropriate way of eating and it is termed achillah gassah. This refers to eating large quantities at a time, or being gluttonous. This type is eating is actually not even considered eating at all. If one ate in this manner on Yom Kippur, one is not punished since such behavior is actually considered affliction, and is in accordance with the commandment to afflict oneself on Yom Kippur (Yoma 80:B).

    The Talmud also discusses another type of achillah gassah. In this version, if eating is a requisite to fulfill a Biblical precept, and one ate in a achillah gassah manner, it is considered a technical fulfillment of the law, but is not considered in the spirit of the law (Nazir 23:A).

    To summarize this concept, the Tosafot clearly explains that there are two types of achillah gassah, two levels of overeating. The first level of overeating is when one does not have an appetite, but can still taste the food. The second level is when one eats until he is in pain.”

    http://jewess.canonist.com/?p=512

  4. JP Says:
    September 12th, 2008 at 12:44 pm

    While I appreciate the hypothetical situation, and agree that the taste and nutritional quality of Real food is drastically higher than fast and box food- I just want to question the conclusion here.

    “A child who has never been served a meal prepared by people who care for her may never understand how challenging it is to sustain a family with care and dignity.”

    I’m worried there are pretty big assumptions about class here, and I’d love to hear Rabbi Feingold explain this a little more.

    If you live/are raised in a neighborhood without access to Fresh foods, are you inherently rebellious? (And, according to the hypothetical, glutinous and should be killed?) If your family (rich or poor) is pressed for time to cook for you, will you turn out inherently bad? Doubtful.

    But perhaps I’ve misunderstood. I’d love to hear other thoughts.

  5. Rabbi Shmuel Says:
    September 13th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    Avi – I spoke in shul today (it’s was the 38th anniversary of my bar mitzva) about the “ben sorer”. The gemara has some incredible observations. It is written in the name of Rav Huna that one can only be found liable for being a ben sorer if he buys meat and wine cheaply (“B’zol” a play on the word “zolel”). At first the statement seems innocuous but upon reflection the cheap meat and wine are oxymoronic as these arereally luxury items – so one of the underlying contrbuting factors to the ben sorer syndrome is artificially reducing prices to meet unreasonable demand (the so-called “high cost of low prices) and the shift of these costs to others or just plain out of sight – it was a timely dvar Torah for as the author of the Tanya once said “we have to live with the times” meaning that we look to the weekly Torah portion to truly understand the issues of our day. So in the month of Elul fingerpointing is warranted – fingerpointing at ourselves for creating such an unthinking climate
    again y’shar kochacha bro!

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