I am still hard at work getting a book manuscript ready to submit. It isn’t scheduled to be published until October, but I promise to say more about it when it’s in, copy-edited, and further along in production. 
I have a book manuscript due the first week in January and need to focus on getting it done.
My holiday wish for me:
Except for an occasional holiday greeting, I won’t be posting anything new until sometime that week.
I wish you the warmest, least stressful, and most joyous holidays!
And happiest of new year’s greetings to you all. May it be a good one (we can and must hope).
Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum. Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food. New York University Press, 2020.
This book comes with heavy-duty endorsements: a Foreword by Hasia Diner, and an Afterword by Jonathan Safran Foer.
I was interested to read it and did a blurb for it.
Feasting and Fasting is a fascinating account of the history of Jewish food, within and outside of dietary laws. The authors engage in Talmudic debates about how specific foods and diets as a whole do or do not define Jewish identity. Crisco is for Jews? Peanut oil caused such debates? Who knew. This book is a great read.
What to quote? So many choices. Here’s a snippet from Jordan Rosenblum’s chapter on Jews and garlic:
After the Exodus from Egypt, when the Israelites wandered in the desert, they grew tired of eating only manna. Comparing the varied diet that they ate as slaves in Egypt to the unvaried diet that they now enjoyed as free women and men, a few troublemakers complained: “The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”
This, as it turns out, is the only mention of garlic in the Hebrew Bible. In this chapter,
we shall briefly explore the historical association between Jews and garlic that develops over the next three millennia. In doing so, we shall see how garlic eventually functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that represents Self and Other—or, in the terminology favored in anthropology and food studies, how garlic operates as a metanym for Jews.
Pet food continues to be an ongoing source of news, and pet food politics an ongoing source of interest:
Comment: My book with Malden Nesheim, Feed Your Pet Right, is actually an analysis of the pet food industry. It came out in 2010 but holds up pretty well, I think, as a means for understanding recent events in pet food politics.
Really? Camel’s milk? I am indebted to DairyReporter.com for a review of research on the health benefits of camel’s milk.
According to this overview, camel’s milk can
A miracle food?
Alas, the article explains, most of these studies were performed in mice or published in journals unlikely to be rigorously peer reviewed.
What can I tell you about the nutritional quality of camel’s milk?
Unfortunately, the USDA’s food composition data base does not have an entry for camel’s milk. What looks like a reasonable review of the nutritional value of camel’s milk (which you can download from this site) suggests that there are differences in nutrient composition between cow’s and camel’s milks, but the differences are small. Because the proteins differ, people sensitive or allergic to cow’s milk will have an easier time consuming camel’s milk.
The big issue with camel’s milk in the United States is that it is not pasteurized. Raw milk carries a greater food safety risk than pasteurized milk.
The FDA also has issued a warning against unproven claims that camel milk prevents autism.
I’m not seeing any particular health benefits from drinking camel milk other than avoiding allergic reactions to cow’s milk.
If you insist on drinking it, make sure it comes from a producer who diligently tests it for pathogens.
