didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. To come right out and say it
was unthinkable. Keeping kosher was so embarrassing and strange. My
father had already put the kibosh on my earlier attempts to become
a fruitarian, to go macrobiotic, to subsist on nothing but Alba
shakes and fun-size candy bars. There was no way he was going to
endorse kashrut.
Even if he had, even if we’d approached the whole process
sanely, keeping kosher properly would have been impossible. In the
early ‘80 s , in rural California, there just wasn’t
much kosher food available. You could get pickles and raisins and
little else. People hadn’t gotten uptight about animal fats yet,
and there was still lard and beef tallow in just about everything.
In a civilized society you expect cereal and juice to be meat-free,
but in 1983 that just wasn’t the case. There was meat in ice cream
and frosting, in potato chips and pancake mix. Oh, not a lot, sure,
but it was the little amounts that bothered me.
Was it because I had shrunk? I had lost all this weight. I was
moving in the wrong direction, getting smaller, and my focus had
shrunk, too. Now I had eyes only for details, specks, fine print. I
lost interest in paperbacks and began reading packaging instead,
studying ingredient lists with myopic fascination.
Soon I was spending all my free time looking up food additives
in the encyclopedia. Most teens liked Tiger Beat . I was more
interested in propylene glycol, sodium stearoyl lactylate,
carrageenan, and xanthan gum. The things that could be in your
food! The carmine that colored fruit punch, it turned out, was
derived from lice. There were calf enzymes in cheese, snouts and
sawdust in luncheon meat. I began writing exposes for the school
newspaper on subjects like ‘Jerky: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You’ and ‘The Truth About Corn Dogs.’
It was around this time that I took to calling restaurants. At
home, I could see my mother preparing dishes so I knew exactly what
had been contaminated by tallow or broth, what had been baked in
the pan where we once found a dead spider and hence was inedible.
But in a restaurant they could be basting the lettuce with clam
juice for all I knew. It was possible. I’d heard stories. It was
widely rumored that the disgruntled busboys at one local
establishment peed in the minestrone.
What concerned me most, however, were not the bodily fluids that
went into the food but the ones that went onto the pans. Were they
greasing them, and if so, were they using a nice, hygienic,
vegetable-based spray like Pam, or did they reach right for the
treyf and hepatitis-contaminated suet? I was especially worried
about pizza pans and began calling pizzerias to ask for details.
The employee who answered had invariably just fielded ten prank
calls asking how thick her crust was and had no patience left for
me.
“You want to know what?”
“What you use to grease your pans.”
“Oh, we use K-Y, just like Julia Child. When we run low on that
we borrow a little motor oil from the delivery van. Okay? And if
you call here again, I’m phoning the cops.”
The anorexia had been plenty annoying for everyone, but my new
condition was even more irritating. I regretted that, but
everything else about it captivated and absorbed me. Scrupulosity
was anorexia amplified, anorexia applied to every area of life.
Anorexics only worried about food. I worried about shampoo, shoe
polish, water, air. Dust. What if some dust got in my mouth? Dust
was composed of skin flakes, I knew, and human skin wasn’t kosher.
It probably didn’t have any calories, sure, but what good is that
when you’re going to hell?
Anorexia and scrupulosity are, in fact, fairly closely related.
They are both obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, treatable
with the same medications, one an almost logical extension of the
other. My severe bouts of scrupulosity were always immediately
preceded by bouts of anorexia, and it’s not at all uncommon to
suffer from both
was unthinkable. Keeping kosher was so embarrassing and strange. My
father had already put the kibosh on my earlier attempts to become
a fruitarian, to go macrobiotic, to subsist on nothing but Alba
shakes and fun-size candy bars. There was no way he was going to
endorse kashrut.
Even if he had, even if we’d approached the whole process
sanely, keeping kosher properly would have been impossible. In the
early ‘80 s , in rural California, there just wasn’t
much kosher food available. You could get pickles and raisins and
little else. People hadn’t gotten uptight about animal fats yet,
and there was still lard and beef tallow in just about everything.
In a civilized society you expect cereal and juice to be meat-free,
but in 1983 that just wasn’t the case. There was meat in ice cream
and frosting, in potato chips and pancake mix. Oh, not a lot, sure,
but it was the little amounts that bothered me.
Was it because I had shrunk? I had lost all this weight. I was
moving in the wrong direction, getting smaller, and my focus had
shrunk, too. Now I had eyes only for details, specks, fine print. I
lost interest in paperbacks and began reading packaging instead,
studying ingredient lists with myopic fascination.
Soon I was spending all my free time looking up food additives
in the encyclopedia. Most teens liked Tiger Beat . I was more
interested in propylene glycol, sodium stearoyl lactylate,
carrageenan, and xanthan gum. The things that could be in your
food! The carmine that colored fruit punch, it turned out, was
derived from lice. There were calf enzymes in cheese, snouts and
sawdust in luncheon meat. I began writing exposes for the school
newspaper on subjects like ‘Jerky: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You’ and ‘The Truth About Corn Dogs.’
It was around this time that I took to calling restaurants. At
home, I could see my mother preparing dishes so I knew exactly what
had been contaminated by tallow or broth, what had been baked in
the pan where we once found a dead spider and hence was inedible.
But in a restaurant they could be basting the lettuce with clam
juice for all I knew. It was possible. I’d heard stories. It was
widely rumored that the disgruntled busboys at one local
establishment peed in the minestrone.
What concerned me most, however, were not the bodily fluids that
went into the food but the ones that went onto the pans. Were they
greasing them, and if so, were they using a nice, hygienic,
vegetable-based spray like Pam, or did they reach right for the
treyf and hepatitis-contaminated suet? I was especially worried
about pizza pans and began calling pizzerias to ask for details.
The employee who answered had invariably just fielded ten prank
calls asking how thick her crust was and had no patience left for
me.
“You want to know what?”
“What you use to grease your pans.”
“Oh, we use K-Y, just like Julia Child. When we run low on that
we borrow a little motor oil from the delivery van. Okay? And if
you call here again, I’m phoning the cops.”
The anorexia had been plenty annoying for everyone, but my new
condition was even more irritating. I regretted that, but
everything else about it captivated and absorbed me. Scrupulosity
was anorexia amplified, anorexia applied to every area of life.
Anorexics only worried about food. I worried about shampoo, shoe
polish, water, air. Dust. What if some dust got in my mouth? Dust
was composed of skin flakes, I knew, and human skin wasn’t kosher.
It probably didn’t have any calories, sure, but what good is that
when you’re going to hell?
Anorexia and scrupulosity are, in fact, fairly closely related.
They are both obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders, treatable
with the same medications, one an almost logical extension of the
other. My severe bouts of scrupulosity were always immediately
preceded by bouts of anorexia, and it’s not at all uncommon to
suffer from both
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