Comments on: What Diet Coke Taught Me About Food Tshuvah

By: Michael Croland

Michael Croland — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:52:04 +0000

Rabbi Kahn-Troster, I loved this piece! I would’ve said so sooner, but I wanted to wait until I could share this link: http://prime.peta.org/2008/09/.....d-teshuvah (or if that doesn’t work: http://tinyurl.com/3smt9e). It’s my guest post on the PETA Prime blog, in which I quoted you and went with your theme to discuss another “food teshuvah” topic.

Shana tova!

By: stacey

stacey — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:12:44 +0000

I love this post. Probably because I too eat as consciously as I can – vegan, co-op & farmers market shopper, local seasonal produce for my home – with a nagging Diet Coke habit that I kick from time to time, has definitely gone down over the years, but tends to increase at my parents’ kitchen table. And, in a bit of skewed logic, I will always choose a bottle of Diet Coke over a bottle of water – lest the corporations think I agree with the bottling, transporting and selling such a thing.

I’m looking at this post and “Kashrut has no God” and seeing the comparison of weighing our actions. I was thinking to comment on that post about the default – whether the default is to keep kosher with exceptions and conversations made for when it is not kept or whether the default is to eat as one wants, but to acknowledge those times when one chooses to follow kashrut.

But, from reading your post and your thoughts on mindful eating, I think the ideal is neither of those and that we should not just be aware of when we are eating “right” or “wrong” but are equally aware of both and know when we can steer our wrong choices into the right. Thank you for the reminder that we do make our choices every day and especially for the reminder not to take our food for granted.

And to answer your question, I view not just my occasional Diet Coke, but also the occasional orange or banana as an egregious sin, which makes me realize that perhaps my greater wrongdoing is the too lofty attitude in which I approach my food choices and their impact. So I will acknowledge the good and the bad choices I make, but I will also remember that it is only because I am blessed with sufficient resources that I can make these choices – small or large farms, meat or not, organic or conventional – and that many people eat merely for sustenance and don’t have these options.

By: lauren ahkiam

lauren ahkiam — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:42:33 +0000

i never cottoned to the diet taste, but i love love love sugary fizzy drinks. i also have tried to keep away by never buying them for my house, but have a remarkable ability to drink my weight in soda at free-refill places so have made a “rule” that i can only drink soda with real sugar. it’s harder to come by and is never available in free refills. mostly it’s either from mexico or natural (e.g. reed’s ginger brew).

but the more food sin would be that i feel guilty for eating factory-farmed eggs and dairy. i’ve been a vegetarian for almost 20 years, but have had an awful time weeding these out of my diet. i don’t eat much cheese, but i do eat some, and though it’s RBGH-free, it’s not from small trustworthy dairy farmers. i buy “cage-free organic” eggs, but who really knows? i’d rather get both at the farmer’s market, but i’m too forgetful or lazy to actually do it. sigh. maybe i will use this month to do a teshuva and make a new habit.