1. J&D’s Bacon Salt

Their entire range is kosher certified, but let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start: Original Bacon-Flavored Seasoning Salt.

Says reviewer Trenton M. Haxby (the name might not be real, but the enthusiasm is): “BaconSalt is exactly what you think it is. It literally makes everything taste better. Try it on anything, it even goes on popcorn! I got it as a gift and I’m going to give it as a gift. Everyone needs to try it, and since there is no fat, no calories and it is kosher, it is for everyone!”

2. Betty Crocker’s Bac-os Bits

Confusingly, there’s another almost-identical Betty Crocker product called Bac-os chips. (If there is a discernible difference between the two, please report back in the comments.) From the Amazon product description:

“Committing to a healthy diet is a great way to take care of yourself and your loved ones. A healthy diet means selecting a variety of foods, including plenty of grain products, vegetables and fruits. Choosing foods that are low in fat, saturated fat and cholesterol is important. Bacos bits are made with the goodness of soy and can help you put these healthy eating tips into practice. In addition, Bacos is now Kosher and contains no added MSG.”

I can state with confidence that Bac-os contain no traces of grains, vegetables, or fruits, but they do make a nice (if incongruous) salad topping.

3. Kernel Season’s Bacon Cheddar Popcorn Seasoning

Double treyf: this “100% natural” seasoning mixes milk and meat!

4. Baconnaise

Delusional vegetarians claim this mayo tastes just like bacon. They’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s not delicious. Says Amazon reviewer/would-be Disney sitcom star, Enchanted in Dixie: “I am a bacon connoisseur since I was raised on a farm and we made our own. I love all kinds of bacon, and just got diagnosed with high blood pressure so no more real bacon. 4 stars since I love the Smokey flavor this mayo has, but to me there is no bacon flavor to it, only a good Smokey flavor.” TRUST.

5. Bacon Lip Balm

Because who doesn’t want to make out with someone who tastes like bacon? (NB: Technically not kosher certified, but not something you’re meant to eat, either.)

The post Kosher Bacon: More Than Just Ritz Crackers! appeared first on Jewcy.

Like Justice Potter Stewart, I cannot definitively say what constitutes food porn, but I know it when I see it. Food porn isn’t erotic in a traditional romantic sense (Although South Park aired a 2010 episode about it in which Randy gets a little too involved with the Food Network). Rather, it’s the glamorization of food with images—and thanks to Instagram and other social networking platforms, it’s become a colloquial phrase. Capitalizing on that trend are two 24-year-old University of Colorado grads with their new website, MrFoodPorn.

Mixing photos and prose, Noah Rinsky and Josh Seigel use their site as a Manhattan-based forum for detailing their experiences with high-end food. Writing about expensive dining can quickly turn people off, so they opted for a silly name and quirky logo—a messy man all suited up, with a turkey leg in hand and stains dribbled on his lapel—to garner a wider audience. And to keep Mr FoodPorn from being too indulgent (the site’s ‘About Us’ section reads, “We’re devourers of all things fleshy, bready, and over indulgent; eaters to the first degree, scaling the highest meringue-mountains of wanton culinary delight!”), Rinsky and Seigel devoted a page to two hunger-fighting charities, Food Bank for New York City, and City Harvest. Giving back is important to them, and I’m sure it helps the conscience when you’re sinking your teeth into those sugar-cured bacon strips, which Rinsky won’t eat because he’s kosher. Instead, Seigel gives him play-by-plays of the bacon-wrapped matzo balls at Traif in Brooklyn.

They seek to add substance and creativity to the language around food porn. Instead of simply photographing your deep-fried dinner and adding a #nomnom hashtag, Rinsky and Seigel describe exceptional meals for their audience, who can read leisurely while salivating freely. They both work in the food industry, so they write about the culinary world beyond just the dining experience. In this excerpt, Mr FoodPorn describes his high-stress experience as a trainee waiter at the upscale Manhattan restaurant Eleven Madison Park.

“What is so unique about the river that runs along this vineyard?” he asks, and I assume that the metaphor will become more lucid if I’m ever allowed in the inner circle. Or is he just quoting The Master?

“I-I’m…” stutters the seasoned waiter. “I’m not quite sure.”

A look of disgust consumes the manager’s face as he calls on another server, who he applauds for saying something that I find cryptic at best, moronic at worst. I keep asking myself if I even want this job, and I consider the money; the huge bills, the massive tips; fifteen courses, hundreds of wines, five-thousand-dollar tabs. I do. I really really do want to work here. Before entering the dining room, I watch servers fold napkins as they go over the menu with me. The napkins must be folded identically and each stack must be the same height. When this is through, I’m asked to go look at myself in the mirror and am told that my collar isn’t right. I search without finding error, and a server is nice enough to fix it for me. Dinner service starts and I follow Jacob, my server for the night, into the grand dining room. Eleven Madison Park’s ceilings seem to expand and soar, and the huge windows give the impression of Old World Europe. The job is constant movement, and I sweat right through my cotton shirt. Each table is assigned a team of servers. There are so many that I’m afraid of knocking something over, so I ask Jacob what happens if I do.

Rinsky and Seigel just threw a launch party for Mr FoodPorn, and according to Seigel, who’s been tracking analytics, the site has been steadily gaining readers (he recently quit his day job to work on the website full time). While they continue to develop and grow the site, more poutine and calf liver will no doubt be consumed—and, of course, viscerally described, bite by bite.

The post Two Hungry Jews Create ‘MrFoodPorn’ Site to Chronicle Eating Adventures appeared first on Jewcy.

My sister and I walk into a restaurant. We sit down, look over the menu, and there it is—my personal sin, the bacon burger. The photo glistens temptingly and I surrender to it. I place my order and my sister gives me the ultimate ‘You bad, bad Jew’ expression. I know that I’m lucky to get away with just a frown from her, as it typically is accompanied by a verbal reminder that we are Jewish and shouldn’t ever eat bacon as a result. After her distaste is properly displayed, clear of conscience, my sister orders herself a plate of popcorn shrimp.

Soon the taste of my delicious bacon burger simmers in my mouth. In my mind, though, the little long-bearded, kippah-wearing angel sits solemnly on one shoulder shaking his head back and forth, while a miniature Howard Stern, in twisted rabbinical form, says on the opposite shoulder: ‘Come on! What’s the big deal? Baco-Jewish pride, man!’

My sister munches down her equally non-kosher meal not only free from self-critique or conflict, but with the knowledge that it’s highly unlikely that a random kosher squad will be patrolling what she eats. For some odd reason, it seems that, were we both to be trayf terrorists, the kosher squad would see her as only packing a hand grenade, while I’m holding the atomic bacon bomb.

At some point, though, we have to ask ourselves: Where did this outstanding anti-pork prejudice come from? Yeah, okay, it’s not kosher. But if you ask a lot of Jews today what other animals aren’t kosher, many will draw a blank.

But let’s be honest. Most of us don’t aren’t inundated with seedy back-alley images of that filthy, contaminating, $15-a-pound lobster. We don’t hear about the average Jewish parent keeping careful watch that the $90-an-ounce Siberian sturgeon caviar doesn’t get its little unscaled fishhooks inside their kids, leading them off the properly beaten kosher path.

But you eat one little slice of bacon, and boom—you’ve gone over to the dark side.

As strange as this may sound, I opted to eat bacon for health reasons. I am epileptic and, as such, I largely use the doctor-recommended ketogenic diet to maintain my body’s welfare. Of all the foods in the ketogenic diet, the one that I have found quieted petit mal seizures second best of all was bacon. Therefore, not only do I recommend giving bacon a shot, despite being a Jew, I’d even go so far as to recommend it despite being a rabbinical student.

And anyway, why are pigs so much more unclean than other non-kosher animals? Because pigs, unlike the vulture, the bat, and the weasel, decided to try and trick us. At least that’s the consensus rabbinical ruling on the subject. Technically, kosher law necessitates a cleft hoof and a chewing of cud. With most non-kosher animals, this is a fairly easy thing to assess. Just like the saying goes that you can tell everything you need to know about a person by their shoes, you can typically take a glance at the animal’s feet and know whether or not it’s kosher.

Except in the instance of the pesky pig. It’s the only animal that has a split hoof but does not chew its cud. Therefore, the pig alone has the ability to mislead the less-knowledgeable Jew into making a dinner out of it.

And what is cud chewing, incidentally? It’s the practice of vomiting food up and eating it a second time. Kosher animals, like the cow, prefer to enjoy their meals two times, not just one. This, the pig does not do. A strange fact, but it is due to spew that cows and their kosher brethren have come out spotless, while the primmer pig has become the poster child of uncleanliness in Judaism.

So what are the effects of the pig being the ultimate bad guy? Well, for one, when there’s one big bad guy, we tend to focus less on other offenders. Because of this, more Jews eat shrimp and caviar without moral quibbles, while pointing a finger at the so-called Baco-Jews. It winds up not only being a hypocritical situation, but one that has, to many, stifled true understanding of kashrut law. Were the pig not seen as so over-the-top horrible, perhaps more Jews who want to keep kosher would know to pass on shrimp, too.

Another result of vilifying the swine is that those condemning it may have actually added to its allure. In the days of prohibition, outlawing alcohol only made the public drink more. These days there are Baco-Jew stuffed animals, bumper stickers, posters, greeting cards, mouse pads, hats, and just about every other kind of available merchandise. I’ve seen T-shirts with slogans reading, “Jews for Bacon! Reform Now!” and “Citizens for Kosher Bacon!” For many, especially young people, it has become an American Jewish obsession—the love that once dared not speak its name, but now shouts it pretty loudly.

So, if we want the next generation to follow kosher law, what might be some steps we can take to better encourage that? First, knock the pig down from its unfair and shameful pedestal. We should teach that all unkosher animals are equally unkosher. The Shrimp Jew should not be allowed to mock the Baco Jew and get away with it, because so long as one is treated as a misdemeanor and the other a felony, the Jewish kitchen courtroom loses a large degree of credibility.

Let’s take the might and mystery away from bacon. Maybe it tastes good; maybe it doesn’t. But it shouldn’t be used as the symbolic embodiment of Jews Gone Wild.

Previously on Jewcy: Why Are Jews So Obsessed With Bacon?
Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher

***

Like this post? Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get new Jewcy stories in your inbox every Friday morning.

The post The Bacon Chronicles: Why All Trayf Should Be Created Equal appeared first on Jewcy.

Earlier this month, the condiment company J&D’s (“Everything should taste like bacon”) released—and quickly sold out of—a line of bacon condoms. The product is now only available by waiting list, and if you don’t believe that artificially-flavored latex prophylactics would sell, see for yourself.

Not surprisingly, J&D’s is a half-Jewish enterprise, the Jewish half being Dave Lefkow. In an interview, Lefkow said that he thought it would be funny to get J&D’s seminal product, Bacon Salt, kosher certified (it contains no actual bacon).

Traif is a hip(ster) restaurant in Brooklyn whose executive chef is, no surprise, a Jew—and whose tag line is “Celebrating pork, shellfish & globally inspired soul food.” The late David Rakoff wrote about his experience of eating pork in Germany, which made him feel very aware of his own Jewishness. Luzer Twersky, a former Satmar who left his Hasidic community (and may soon star in a reality show about it), told the New York Post, “When I had the first bite, I felt angry…I felt how could my parents keep this from me?”

Bacon is more than a pig product. It’s a cultural statement. The fetish, the joke, and the irony justify consuming bacon, though it is fattier than fat, and the trayfiest of trayf. Did the Post ask an ex-Hasid about an innocuous non-kosher food like Starburst Fruit Chews or Jell-O? No. Because who cares about Starburst Fruit Chews and Jell-o? They went right to the bacon. Bacon carries cultural currency.

As an observant Jew, here’s what bacon represents to me: If you’re Jewish, even if you’re a secular Jew, eating bacon is saying, ‘I am Jewish, but I think I am refuting my Jewishness by eating trayf in public, so therefore I am totally affirming my Jewishness.’

I myself am stringently, stubbornly kosher. When it comes to bacon, though, I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up kosher, so I’ve tasted it—and I think it’s gross. I’ve thought it was gross since way before I even considered going kosher. Smelling it as I walk by the bodega every morning makes me nauseous. I usually hold my nose past the coffee carts selling egg and bacon sandwiches on my way to work. My worst nightmare is to be feeling a little sick on a warm, poorly-ventilated, rocking subway car only to have some pork eater get on the car eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich. I feel like puking into my messenger bag. (I actually carry barf bags with me in case of this very situation.)

The weird resurgence of bacon in the past five years as an object of culinary fetish seems to me to be a direct reaction to increased awareness of healthy food (Skinny Bitch, Fast Food Nation, et al.), and also to what is basically the emergence of the second wave of American baalei teshuva (the first being in the 1960’s). Suddenly every dudebro and his “ironic” hipster cousin are indulging in bacon as a statement.

That statement is a lot like that of the “bad kids” I went to high school with, the most obnoxious of whom used to sing in the halls to his Rage Against the Machine tape on his walkman, “F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Except he totally did what people told him. He’s for sure making more money now than I am—and playing a lot of golf. (I know that because of Facebook.)

At Pardes, Brooklyn’s boundary-breaking gourmet kosher restaurant famous for its unlikely combinations of flavors, the chef occasionally makes beef “bacon” ice cream. Pushing the porcine flavor of bacon in the already revolting medium of parve ice cream has to be done to make a point (because there is no way it could be done for flavor). The point is, as Dr. Evil said in Austin Powers, “I’m with it…I’m hip.”

I don’t really care what other people eat, as long as they don’t strap me to a chair, hold my nose, and shove their nasty food in my mouth. But the Jews and bacon shtick—and it is completely shtick—it’s a fetish. It’s a symbol. If Jews want to eat bacon in private because they have a compulsion for it, that’s none of my business.

But Jew fools himself if he eats bacon. No matter what he eats, if he two-fists bacon-wrapped scallops covered in mayonnaise on white bread and washes it down with a glass of milk while kneeling down to idols, he will always be Jewish. In that case, why not give the Jewish soul what it actually wants: kosher food.

From this author: It’s Hard to Be a Mensch at a Crowded Kosher Supermarket on Thursday Night

Previously on Jewcy: Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Hebrew National and Me: Answering to a Higher Authority
Insane Trayf Item of the Week: Bacon Coffin
Exposed: The Jewcy Bacon Fetish

The post Why Are Jews So Obsessed With Bacon? appeared first on Jewcy.

• Behold: Allen Ginsberg’s borscht recipe. [Brain Pickings]

• Looks like bacon isn’t going away anytime soon. [TIME]

• A look at Jeremy Piven as Mr. Selfridge. [Esquire]

• Scroll man Adam Chandler revisits his teenage days, where troublemaking Jewish Texans literally stole Baby Jesuses from front lawns. [Tablet]

• Larry King survived a Twitter death hoax. [Twitter]

• Nick Kroll, aka Ruxin from The League, is one half of PubLIZity, our favorite new fake reality show. The other half? Jenny Slate.

The post Daily Jewce: Allen Ginsberg’s Borscht Recipe, Everyone Still Loves Bacon appeared first on Jewcy.

Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt fix:
On Forgiveness
Jews with Tattoos

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork appeared first on Jewcy.

I don’t care about food. Sometimes, I’ll forget to eat until three or four in the afternoon, at which point I’ll go to one of two cafes and get the same sandwich I always get. I often have the same meals day in and day out, with only the slightest variety in high-carb intake: instant mashed potatoes, seven minute pasta, raw cookie dough. If I ever tell you I’m going to cook for you, it will be a grilled cheese sandwich, maybe with a flourish of avocado if I’m feeling fancy. Beyond, needing it to live, food is just not a priority.

Growing up, however, I was told that God cared very, very much about what I ate. It was so important that God, and rabbis doing his bidding, created an elaborate set of rules to make sure I kept my body pure. Keeping kosher (kashrut, whatever) is ultimately the greatest divide between Judaism and Western Society, a day-to-day reminder that to be Jewish is to Not Be other things. Big Macs are not yours, Red Lobster is not yours, the food of a hundred other cultures from a hundred countries is not yours, nor are you to touch a piece of it. You have kugel.

I still keep kosher. I have, however, given up most of the other religious beliefs I was raised with. That makes me a kosher atheist, and I’m not the only one. A recent profile of Ezekiel Emanuel, wonder-doc and brother of Rahm and Ari, reveals that he, too, is an atheist who keeps kosher. Lisa Miller picked up on this, and questioned his eating habits in the Washington Post. Determining that Emanuel’s own reasoning is “wobbly,” she concludes that the real reason an atheist would observe these dietary laws is because—wait for it—they aren’t atheist at all! Rather, keeping kosher is a way to remain in contact with the “transcendent parts of life,” whatever those are. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an atheist. She writes:

Usually when a person ditches religion, he or she also happily ditches the antiquated rules and regulations that go along with a strict observance of faith. Good-bye, stupid rules about who can have sex with whom, and under what circumstances!

Really? That’s what people are thinking about? I’d never claim to speak for anyone else, but my own coming out as an atheist was nothing but painful. I grew up in a proud, loving, religious community. Every aspect of my identity was defined by a religious Judaism: not just who my friends were, but every person I knew, and every activity I participated in. Maybe there’s nothing unique about being raised religious in America, but I remember every detail of it. A lot of that rests on food: Friday night dinners, seders, getting the toys from Happy Meals without the burger.

I also remember slowly starting to realize that none of it was for me. As a kid, I had assumed that no one actually prayed, and when I realized otherwise, it started to become clear the whole God thing wasn’t for me. The summer before college, the big question among the students at my yeshiva was who would stay religious and who wouldn’t. For many, the answer was clear: some were already sneaking in trips to In N’ Out Burger during lunch breaks, and others were going to Israel. It wasn’t until I entered my college dining hall, 3,000 miles away from home, that I first grappled with the question myself.

Faced with endless food options, I backed myself into a pizza-filled corner. I had no fully formed opinions about religion, but figured that I could play it safe by eating only pizza. Breakfast, lunch and
dinner, that’s pretty much how it went for that first year. On spiritual autopilot, my only real crisis came when I won concert tickets—for a Friday night show. Panicked, I called a high school friend, who asked me to weigh what was more important: one night’s fun or 5,000 years of tradition. It was an odd comparison, I thought, but I ended up choosing the latter.

Soon after that, a family friend back home, and a pillar of our synagogue’s community, died suddenly. I ran to American University’s Kay Spiritual Life Center to pray, but as soon as I opened the siddur I realized I felt emptiness in what I was doing. These were words written by wise men from the Middle Ages who didn’t know the man who died, and, even more disturbing, I knew their words were going nowhere. The idea of existence beyond the grave felt, first and foremost, false. All my past hesitations with religion suddenly made sense. I left the Spiritual Life Center knowing that I had no use for it anymore.

There wasn’t any joy in that, at all. No vitriolic triumphalism, no throwing the rule book in anyone’s face, just the knowledge that God wasn’t (and still isn’t) an idea I could accept. It was a very depressing thought, honestly. It led to hours-long conversations with my parents, since I was convinced that with one more explanation of the Jewish people I’d finally understand the concept of faith. I tried to embrace secular Judaism, a disaster which left me crying in a bookstore holding a copy of Hannah Arendt’s Jewish Writings. All I had left were the rules.

And then those fell, one by one. Keeping Shabbos was the first to go; the joys of Saturday Netflix came easily. Hanging out with a mainly Jewish crowd also quickly fell out, as all the kids who went to the Hillel were assholes. It became clear that the thousands of years of tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax, just didn’t mean a whole lot to me.

The one thing that remained were those sticky dietary laws. They felt removed from the culture they had come from, as if my parents had conjured them out of thin air. I was lonely on the opposite coast, and picking out what I did and didn’t eat gave me a tangible connection back to the warmth of Los Angeles. Months became years, and I eventually realized that I had stopped eating meat altogether.

In the profile, Emanuel plays coy about why he still keeps kosher, stating that “Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are not the same.” I’m pretty pleased with that obnoxious non-answer, mostly because it reflects my own uncertainty as to exactly why I keep these rules. Acquaintances are routinely shocked (shocked!) when I tell them I’ve never had the slightest curiosity about oysters, pepperoni slices, or that holiest of holies, bacon. Maybe someday, but I doubt it. And my knowledge about vegetarianism extends as far as the liner notes to Moby’s album 18 (he makes a pretty convincing argument about utilitarianism and the world’s resources).

A friend suggests that Emanuel does what he does because “it annoys people,” which makes sense to me. It’s a way for us to embrace our parent’s traditions and communities on our terms. I wish Miller would look past hokey terms like “transcendental” to describe decisions to remain involved in religious communities. I eventually came to realize that just because I was giving up yarmulkes and the six hundred and thirteen mitzvahs didn’t mean I had to lie about who I had grown up with. Keeping kosher is a concrete way to keep alive the ties to the people who raised me—my parents, my friends, my first community. And there’s nothing more real than that.

Art by Margarita Korol

The post Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher appeared first on Jewcy.

Rookie, Tavi Gevinson’s online teen magazine that is anything but a teen magazine, published an interview with Carrie Brownstein today, and something big happened midway through. While the endlessly talented Brownstein, writer and star of IFC’s Portlandia and a 2010 Big Jewcy, was explaining how she taught herself to play guitar, Tavi chimed in unexpectedly:

TAVI: Guys, sorry to interrupt, but I just had bacon for the first time.

ANAHEED: What?!

CARRIE: You loved it!

ANAHEED: Wait, you’ve never had bacon before? You totally did it the right way: you didn’t pre-announce that you were about eat bacon for the first time.

CARRIE: Because then we would’ve been watching you. And now there’s bacon on everything else we ordered, so.

Mazel tov, Tavi, and welcome to the club.

Previously: The Big Jewcy: Carrie Brownstein, Musician/Writer
Carrie Brownstein Does Everything
Related: Hey Rookie, Welcome to the Big League [Tablet Magazine] America’s Next Teenage Jewish Fashionista [Tablet Magazine]

(Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images for MIU MIU)

The post Tavi Gevinson Eats Bacon For The First Time With Carrie Brownstein appeared first on Jewcy.

According to the company’s website:

The “aha moment” came at a kosher wedding that Justin was attending in New York. He described the joys of bacon, and that we needed more of it, to a group of people who are restricted from eating it. He said that there should be a bacon condiment, and dubbed it “Bacon Salt.” It wasn’t until much later that we realized that we could actually kosher certify a salt that tasted like bacon.

The guys insist the bacon coffin isn’t an April Fools’ Day joke, and Esch says they’ve already sold one. Be careful though, they don’t accept returns.

The post Insane Trayf Item of the Week: Bacon Coffin appeared first on Jewcy.