61.0°,
Mostly Cloudy How can something so good feel so bad?
Perhaps you heard the ambulances racing through our streets in the wee hours of Dec. 12. Emergency rooms were flooded with people suffering chest pain and abdominal spasms. The volume of cases quickly overwhelmed physicians and nurses who were mystified by the epidemic.
A cluster of mutated H1N1? Anthrax? Pox?
They should have called me because I could have told them it was just the latkes. Happens every year.
For those who slept well on the night of Dec. 11 and didn’t wake up clutching their chests (meaning those who didn’t consume latkes), Friday was the first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, and in thousands of homes on Long Island, people celebrated by eating fried potato pancakes known as latkes. The pancakes are made by grating fresh potato with fresh onion, an egg and some matzo meal. The mixture is dropped into hot oil and fried.
The Bible tells us that up until the age of 12 we can eat as many latkes as we like, but once we become a bar or bat mitzvah, we must subtract one latke per year. By age 50 it is high-risk behavior to eat more than two, but few people adhere to the limitations.
I’m thinking that it must seem odd to those not of the Jewish faith that people would indulge in a food that makes them bolt upright at 4 a.m. with paralyzing pains in the gut. But you have to understand: Jewish holidays are all associated with unhealthy foods from the old country. Briskets consumed on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, can clog every artery in your heart before Yom Kippur, a week later.
Matzo balls, eaten in great quantity over Passover, don’t leave the digestive tract for months. Sometimes they don’t leave at all, appearing on X-rays years later.
According to a joke circulating on the Internet, the basis of all Jewish celebrations is, “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.”
We eat when babies are born, when boys are circumcised and when people die. We eat to celebrate the harvest and to usher in the Sabbath. But we don’t have any salad days or cottage cheese festivals. More often there is soup with dumplings and chicken with potato pudding and beef with fried onions.
