Foods of affliction

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Early in the Jewish Passover Seder, the leader reverently holds up a piece of matzos with the words: “Lo! This is the bread of affliction!” and that’s the last time anyone mentions that particular elephant in the room.

The mark of a Jewish hostess is to make matzo meal into light, fluffy ‘kneidlach’ without any rising agent. When successful, served in chicken soup (a tribal panacea guaranteed to cure all ills including the coronavirus), it makes matzos vaguely palatable, however when unsuccessful, the result is a bit like a depth charge. I just wonder whether our forebears knew that their hastily baked unleavened loaves for their fraught exodus from Egypt were condemning their descendants to an annual week of constipation for the next few millennia?

But have you ever heard a Jewish person say: ‘I don’t like matzos?’

Humans are funny that way. It’s by no means unique to the Jewish tradition to ritually eat certain unpalatable foods out of reverence and homage to an historic event.

In the Netherlands and much of Western Europe, where real food shortages during WWII are still within living memory, it’s worse than farting in church to admit ‘I don’t like kale/spinach/cabbage’. You’ll quickly be reminded that 'during the war', that was often all people had to east, so the noxious weed continues to infest allotments 75+ years later. Pointing out that we do not have a rumen and as such, our digestive system is ill-evolved to process cellulose won’t endear you to anyone.

So what is the ‘food of affliction’ in your culture or where you live? Something you have to learn to force down because resistance is futile?


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