Not too long before we left for Perú, I made two decisions. One was to try my best to live as Jewishly as I am able to, most notably by keeping as many laws of kashrut as I am able to do. The second, as a logical (to me) outgrowth of that, was to become vegetarian.
Let me ‘splain. In November I was reading about the reasons and details of kashrut and what it all boiled down to was a controversial little phrase called “the sanctity of life.” (This does not mean what you think it means, but this is a topic for another day.) To lay out a long path quickly, I recognized that I am not comfortable with the idea that my life should be recklessly and wastefully sustained through the sacrifice of another life. The easiest way for me to reconcile my feelings with dietary needs was to eliminate animal protein entirely.
…And then we left for Perú. Where (un)surprisingly, there is secret meat in everything. We ordered an innocuous dish called “fried cheese” and lo, rolled inside was a secret swatch of ham. This was merely the first night, a few hours after we’d landed in Lima, but it worked out to be a good predictor of how the rest of the trip would be. Needless to say, I was bound to reality by the nature of being a busy traveler in a completely foreign country, and I relaxed both my efforts to attempt to keep kosher and my vegetarianism. I merely avoided treif and meat consumption as often as I could.
But a funny thing happened during our travels. I got my first frank look at a country that has a healthy relationship with its meat farming industry (if you can call it that.) There are farms literally everywhere in Perú, and on those farms are grown a variety of products, terraced into the mountainsides, and fallow land grazed by… cows, pigs, sheep, llamas, alpacas, etc. Much of the meat people eat in Perú is raised by actual people, on actual pasture land, not on mechanical feedlots with a heaping side of antibiotics. They say happy cows come from California, but this is just not true. The cows looked happier and the milk tasted better in Perú.
Spending three weeks in a place where a) people on average eat far less meat than Americans do and b) the animals are farmed responsibly and cared for in a way that honors their life and minimizes their suffering, I couldn’t help but take away that a healthy food system is a goal that we should have. A healthy food system is something that should be supported. It’s my responsibility to model ethical meat consumption by minimizing the frequency and quantity of meat in my diet and sourcing those animal proteins I do consume from ethical farms.
Which brings us back to kashrut, the basis of which is to be mindful of the animal lives we take in the name of human sustenance. I think that my chosen dietary path falls neatly into the laws of kashrut, and the rest is my symbolic journey to create a Jewish life where I didn’t have one before. I can give up shellfish, I can commit to separating milk from my animal proteins, I can absolutely live without pork products and guinea pigs. (The extent to which my home is kosher is yet to be determined by a frank discussion with my husband, who… likes him some treif as well as the next non-religious Jew.)
Beyond ethical living, keeping kosher becomes a way in which my life changes because I am becoming Jewish. I can’t and wouldn’t want to live my same life after conversion; what would be the point? I should always look to change my life for the better, not least because I am adopting a new culture.
