Does a Jew miss BBQ?
I’m a major foodie — I love to eat and I love to cook. Now, before I learned that I have Jewish heritage and started living a kosher lifestyle, I was just like every other goyim (gentile) out in the rest of the world. By that I mean that I would eat both clean and unclean foods. And one of my favourites was good old southern barbecue. I can cook a mean pork loin, let me tell you (it ain’t bragging if you can do it, and I can). Imagine this: a huge pork loin laid open butterfly style, stuffed with pecans and blueberries, with pure maple syrup drizzled on it, then dusted with brown sugar, closed up, tied up and smoked over hot coals and cherry smoking chips. Mmmm… I can almost taste it. But, I can’t. Not anymore and the reason why may surprise you.
While the kosher dietary laws were handed down to us from Adonai in the book of Leviticus, being raised goyim I didn’t follow them as I’d been taught that they were for the Jews, not the gentiles. But, I admit, I’d always wondered about it. When I “converted” to Messianic Judaism I took on the yoke of living a kosher life. At first, it was no big deal to me if I had bacon with my breakfast, or even the occasional bratwurst. Then one evening while my wife and I were watching television, me flipping channels, I ran across a preacher I’d heard before and thought was good. So, I stopped flipping channels to find out what he was saying and his sermon just happened to be on living a kosher life — not the how, but the why. Geoff Youlden is a Seventh Day Adventist preacher down in Australia and listening to his sermon completely changed how I looked at kosher versus non-kosher.
Youlden’s sermon combined scripture with science, showing a correlation between living a non-kosher life and having cancer. There is scientific data that shows that there are vastly higher rates of cancers in people who do not follow kosher food laws. Well, how can this be, you ask? Here is how Youlden explained it. Take an ordinary shrimp. What does it do? It’s a bottom feeder. The shrimp filter out the wastes in the water. It eats the garbage, waste and scum that collects on the seafloor. Fishermen catch these shrimp, you buy them, take them home, cook them and eat them. Congratulations, you have just eaten a dirty filter full of pollution.
Next he spoke about the rabbit. Rabbits are cute and fluffy and supposedly very tasty (I’ve never eaten one). But rabbits are unclean. You know those poo pellets that are all nice and round that collect at the bottom of a rabbit’s cage? That is what rabbit feces look like the second time it comes out of the rabbit. That’s right, a rabbit has difficulty digesting all of the nutrients from its food so it has to eat its own feces to get all of the nutrients. Gross? Definitely. That fecal matter is consumed by the rabbit, enters it’s bloodstream and flows into the muscles (the meat) of the rabbit. So, the rabbit gets processed, you buy it and take it home, cook it up and eat it. Congratulations, you have just eaten rabbit feces. You can watch his entire sermon by clicking here.
A few days after watching Youlden’s sermon, my wife and I had Chinese take out. We ordered the usual which included shrimp fried rice. Both of us — and at about the same time — bit into a shrimp and had this “yuck” sensation. Neither of us touched the shrimp fried rice again — the thought was just too revolting.
So, to answer the original question, “Does a Jew miss BBQ?” The answer is yes, and I’m perfectly fine with that.
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