18.10.09

There's no pork in Israel...


...just a bunch of euphemisms: "basar lavan" (white meat), "basar acher" (other meat), etc.

Most grocery stores in Israel are kosher. At our local Machsane Lahav, I don't need to look for hekshers to know that all the meat is kosher and the margarine parve. This grocery store also closes every Shabbat, which means that if we run out of milk on Saturday, we have to wait until Sunday to buy more. This is one thing I love about Israel; keeping kosher in the US took real effort, but here it's effortless.

Eating treyf, on the other hand, takes effort. It might even involve a trip to the chain store Tiv Ta'am, set far back from the road-- and open on Shabbat. Tiv Ta'am specializes in imported goods and all those nonkosher meats that Israelis see as delicacies. (The difficulty of buying pork raises its value... many Israelis love ordering pig or shrimp when they travel abroad.) But even at Tiv Ta'am, delicate euphemisms prevail in place of the word "chazir," pig/pork. In the picture above, you can see pig parts at Tiv Ta'am ranging from tongues to hearts. Sorry, did I say "pig" parts? I mean "white"... "white tongue," "white heart," "white tail"...

I'll stick with the other other white meat. (As in, chicken. My husband felt I should specify. This is a no treyf zone!)

6 comments:

  1. ha... it's a little sad to resume blogging after such a long hiatus, because clearly nobody checks back here every day any more. (Don't blame you!) I think I'll return to the failproof method of blackmailing family members into posting comments. :) (Did I say "blackmail"? I meant "encourage.")

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  2. Or I could just start posting anonymous comments claiming that they're from other people.

    Did I just say that out loud?

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  3. and then there are the Russian stores that don't even bother with Hebrew.

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  4. Yeah... I just find the Russian stores depressing, along with the fact that they stock Christmas tree decorations in December.

    YAY, Yakov!! Thanks for stopping me from talking to myself! I was about to post from my AIM name. :)

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  5. I'm a little late, but I loved this post! Be careful, though -- the orange margarine is chalavi!! (Yellow, red, blue are, as always, parve.) Tiv Ta'am lasted about 3 months in Modi'in before they gave up and closed shop.

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  6. Dena, thanks for the reminder that I DO need to check the heksher on parve margerine!

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