Year of the Pig

It is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is like British New Year, except we spend it apologising. So perhaps more like the British New Year’s Day. On New Years Day I received a package of brand new John Lewis bathroom towels and bedsheets, with a note saying “I didn’t vom on these ones”. 

So as I consider whom I have wronged in thought and deed and wait for the accounting angels to weigh me in the balance, my mind turns to resolutions for the coming year. 

I have long been considering and delaying giving up my last and deadliest vice. 

Since 2015 the WHO has classed processed meats as a Group 1 carcinogen. There is now sufficient evidence that that products like bacon, salami, chorizo, bratwurst causes colon cancer. 

I like bacon. I like sausage. I love charcuterie of all kinds. My friends refer to my handbag as my ham-bag, due to my propensity to carry piggy snacks. I have friends all over Europe who have smuggled ziplock bags of something naughty on cross continental railway journeys and in the holds of budgets airlines just to give me hits of the good stuff. I once ran a half marathon with my pockets full of snacking chorizo instead of jellybeans and energy gels, because jelly beans and energy gels are gross. I am a Bad Jew. Yadda Yadda Yadda.

When I worked in cabaret, I knew a woman whose act was to smoke a cigarette in a fancy holder, through her bumhole. Little did I know then that I was basically doing the same thing every day at lunchtime, and in front of friends and coworkers. 

Non-Jews get very caught up No Pig thing. Muslims also don’t eat pork, but they also have the No Booze thing with which to bamboozle the British. Both Jews and Muslims, and people mistaken for Jews and Muslims, regularly get bacon posted through their letter boxes along with a brick and a smouldering turd, by people who want to see a return to old fashioned British values. 

I have no idea how ham came to play such a major part in my life. When I was 10 I won my cookery badge in the Cubs by making a ham salad and a baked apple, and whilst I wouldn’t really call this cookery, I would certainly and happily call it dinner. My family weren’t strictly kosher, we weren’t those sort of Jews. We were the sort of Jews who had bacon and eggs on cholla bread on a Saturday morning. A favourite family day out was to Selfridges Food Hall, where we would sample slices of mortadella, bejewelled with opals of fat, emeralds of pistachio and jet shards of peppercorn. We would never, ever, go to The Brass Rail. We weren’t those sort of Jews either.

Bacon was a British staple in the years of rationing and so had made its way into the diet of both my grandfathers. We were brought up to consider it impolite to ask what nature of meat a sausage contained. Roast pork was sometimes served at school, with the toughest, saltiest, most excellent crackling known to man. I fondly remember my first ever pork chop on a school exchange to Athens at 15. I had been quietly and politely starving to death on that trip, subsisting on cans of coke, cigarettes, and the pot of artichokes allocated me by my host’s mother at the beginning of the week, who spoke neither English nor Ancient Greek, but seemed to strongly imply that this was my lot. Then one night to my delight and surprise a slab of appetising but strangely unidentifiable pale meat charred and strewn with oregano, cosseted with chipped potatoes, and more bloody artichokes. I was delirious with joy and would quite happily have sold out any other Jewish “exchange partners” hiding in Stavroula’s crawl-space for one more bite of that forbidden flesh.

The pig has been used as a stick (sausage) to beat the Jews, probably since Leviticus marked the Jews out as pig-deniers, but certainly from medieval times when the image of the Judensow enters German folk mythology. The Judensow is usually depicted as a lady pig which is in some sort of obscene contact with the Jew. The earliest extant image is a wooden carving in the pews of Cologne Cathedral from 1210. The most famous features in the facade of Martin Luther’s church, the Stadtkirche in Wittenberg. The facade dates to 1305 and depicts Jews suckling at the sow’s teats, whilst another feeds from its anus.  It’s enough to put even the most liberal jew off their chitterlings.

We Jews love a good dietary law (we love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by). The one about not bathing a calf in its mothers milk is probably based on a mistranslation, which I’m also guessing is the excuse for the existence of gefilte fish, which was clearly a horrible mistake. And all the stuff about scapegoats and burnt offerings speaks of a time of much tumult and general lawlessness, where a priestly Levite class took it upon themselves appease a vengeful God, expiate the sins of a wild and raucous populous, and get a decent feeding of their priestly faces into the bargain.  The laws of Leviticus promise bounty, in exchange for obedience. 

To quote Puff the Kosher Dragon (which is about the level of my formal theological education)

Puff the Kosher Dragon lived in Palestine

And frolicked in the synagogue and drank Israeli wine

Little Rabbi Goldberg loved that kosher Puff

Ad fed him lox and matzo balls and other kosher stuff.

Then one day it happened, Puff was eating pork

So little Rabbi Goldberg took that dragon for a walk

Carefully he explained that dragons don’t eat meat

That comes from little piggies who have dirty filthy feet.

You don’t need a deity to transmogrify into a burning bush to tell you the bleeding obvious: it’s a bad idea to keep pigs in the desert and an even worse idea to eat them. Pigs can’t sweat to modulate their body temperature, hence all the wallowing in glorious mud. They don’t produce a milk that humans can drink. Poorly stored or ineptly cooked pig meat is prone to make you sick with the trichinosis bacterium. And moreover, pigs eat anything - anything - and the prehistoric taboo about killing and eating things which kill and eat other things seems to have been long established before set out in Leviticus. It is fair to say the average Red Sea Pedestrian would have seen the raising of pigs as socially and economically eccentric thing to do in the Middle East. 

After the Exodus, the Jews live calmly and comfortably in the Holy Land for a few generations. They build temples, which get destroyed by invading armies every couple of generations. This is the first age of Empires and Colonialism. Under the Greeks, we invent our Seder night in imitation of the Symposium, and evening of discussing big ideas over food and wine, whilst reclining at a jaunty angle. Under the Persians, after a certain amount of sitting down and weeping by the rivers of Babylon, we get story of Esther, who averts a genocide, which is commemorated and the festival of Purim, which is another excuse to eat biscuits and drink wine, but instead of leaning to one side, this time we do it in fancy dress.  Under the Salucids we get the Maccabees and therefore Chanukah and therefore latkes.  

And under the Roman Empire, we finally get scattered to the four corners of the globe. 

Douglas Adams said  “every being in the universe is tied to his birthplace by tiny invisible force tendrils composed of little quantum packets of guilt. If you travel far from your birthplace, these tendrils get stretched and distorted… Similarly, if your birthplace is actually destroyed… then these tendrils are severed and flap about at random.”

And this explains a lot about the Jews.  Imagine us adrift in the diaspora, small pockets of guilt in a swirling polytheistic, multicultural, metropolitan morass. Consider the importance of these small domestic rituals of meals and dinner table festivities. Consider the taste of our grandma’s cooking, as she in turn considered the taste of her grandmother’s cooking, through the gefilte fish in the shtetl and back all the way to the apple in the garden. 

They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat. 

(Not the bacon.) 

Happy Jew Year everyone!