Born to Kvetch
Chapter 9: Making A Tsimmes
FOOD-KOSHER AND TREYF

Born to Kvetch extract:

As the voice of a system of thought designed to keep Us Jews from turning into Them Goyim, Yiddish has developed an unusually comprehensive vocabulary of exclusion. Differences between yidish and goyish, sacred and profane, proper and improper, are built into the structure of the language, nowhere more deeply than when Yiddish deals with food. When you're constantly on guard lest a drop of gravy wind up on a plate used for dairy; when Passover, a major holiday, is based on forbidding more foods than usual, and Yom Kippur, the major holiday, forbids any food at all; when food, in other words, becomes a locus of transgression, eating is never too far from your mind. Laconic as Yiddish might sometimes be about nature in the raw, it devotes considerable attention to nature on the plate.

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