I remember it like yesterday – Charlie exclaimed, “You’ve never had a SLURPEE?! Dude?!”

It’s true. Until the ripe age of 32, I had never had a Slurpee. When you grow up in Quebec with their peculiar arcane language laws, there are a lot of corporations that don’t want to take the jump and work out all the French and English stuff. I always assumed that that was why there were no 7/11s in Quebec. The first time I even saw one I was 16 and visiting London, Ontario.

When I moved to the DC area I finally gave it a shot. Simply put they’re good. No doubt. I love Coca Cola in general and this became a whole new mode of ingestion. (Added to Coke Brisket. Coke short ribs. Rum and Coke. Ice Cream Coke Floats. Warm Coke. Cold Coke. Coke with ice cubes. Coke with crushed ice… I think that’s it Forrest.)

And today in my email inbox next to 30 emails about Rubashkins was the “Kosher Slurpee List.” It comes out every year just before the summer. It is available online or in a convenient printable format that I suppose you can put in your car or wallet or can be folded into your portable siddur.

It is a document that should give us all pause.

Let me begin with a really hard question: if we know that eating sugar or modified corn syrup in large quantities is really bad for us, why don’t we picket our rabbinic organizations for giving kosher certification to soda manufacturers?

Check this out. A can of coke has 39 grams of sugar. 7.5 teaspoons! That’s a lot. Now how about this data: If you get the 16oz Slurpee, small, but who does, then there’s 52 grams. Skip ahead to the gigantic 41 oz (1.18L) you get 134 grams of sugar. Holy crap! One cup of sugar is 200 grams. So you are talking…. a lot of sugar.

So I think that the kosher certifiers feel real good about the normalcy that can be created for countless young and old people when they walk into 7/11 and grab a Slurpee. Suddenly keeping kosher is “no big one” and everybody is happy for a few minutes with brainfreeze and hyperglycemia.

How about this question – less heavy: what the hell do we need with 110 flavors of Slurpees. ONE-HUNDRED AND TEN! That does not include all the Mountain Dew flavors which are not separately enumerated. It is becoming like Japan where the beverage industry is on full-tilt all the time coming up with new drinks.

When I was growing up in our neighborhood Dépanneur (think Bodegas in French) and our local Hot Dog shacks we had Slush Puppies. We had about 5 flavors. I was always partial to lime. And if you were lucky it was self serve and you could get an extra shot of flavor syrup on the ice before the mean lady yelled at you. The truly wild would mix two flavors together. I couldn’t do it, an early experience with wool-linen blends messed me up.

Frankly I think it is a mess but I can’t see how we get out of it. I love my kids so we have Slurpees occasionally, one has to indulge. They get an 8 or 10 oz cup and usually one without caffeine. But there are millions of people in this country who will eventually die death by Slurpee.

The Torah commands – al t’amod al dam re’ekha. Do not stand idly by the blood of your brother. In this case that blood-red extra pump of strawberry that drips down the side of a plastic 64 oz Incredible Hulk cup.

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