Seeking Culinary Guidance from God, My Mom, and Kelly Ripa

Passover is traditionally celebrated with two seders—long, breadless feasts in which families recount the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt over Manischewitz wine and matzah ball soup. In Hebrew, seder means order. The evening follows a precise fifteen-step process in which each item on the seder plate symbolizes a different part of the Jewish peoples’ suffering. The metaphors range from subtle to heavy-handed: the beitzah (egg) on the seder plate symbolizes the circle of life, and the salt water we dip our celery into is meant to taste like the Israelites’ tears.

When I was sixteen, my chosen form of rebellion was to disrupt this order. Not at the seder itself, under the watchful eyes of Bubbies and Zaydes, but in the mornings after, when the warmth of family gatherings had cooled and the culinary tyranny of the eight-day holiday loomed ahead. In addition to the rules of Kashrut that govern our diets year-round, new restrictions apply during Passover. Namely, leavened bread is strictly prohibited—when fleeing Egyptian oppression, the Jewish people did not have enough time to let their loaves rise, and we’ve been forced to commemorate their misfortunes with tasteless, flat crackers for millennia since. In observant homes, such as my own, the ban on leavened bread is absolute, meaning everything from Coca-Cola to salad dressing needs to be approved by a Rabbi.

Revolted by overpriced, off-brand kosher cereal, I’d sneak into the basement to scavenge for Honey Nut Cheerios. After peeling through the newspaper my mom used as makeshift caution tape, I’d slink into the laundry room with my treif treats, hunched over a washing-machine-turned-breakfast nook. Inevitably, my mother caught me every time.

“I wasted my money on Jewish day school,” she’d cry.

“I’d rather eat the Honey Nut Cheerios box than ‘Fruity Magic Loops!’” I’d reply. We repeated some variation of this routine every morning for a week.

As a kid, I was flummoxed by Kashrut. The rules felt like arbitrary cruelties meant to deprive me of treats, like cheeseburgers, that my less observant cousins were permitted to enjoy. In order to qualify as kosher, an animal needs cloven hooves and must chew cud, which means you can’t eat pork. Shellfish are off-limits because fish must have both fins and scales. You can’t consume meat and dairy in close proximity because it is forbidden to “seethe a young goat in its mother’s milk.” After a particularly exasperating fight over whether or not I could have ice cream after a chicken dinner (“Chickens don’t produce milk,” I pleaded with my parents), my mother gave me the explanation that has stuck with me most over the years.

“There’s value in doing things you don’t want to do,” she said, guarding the freezer. “It reminds you that you’re Jewish. Do you want to be the one to break the chain?” But I wasn’t interested in continuity. I was far more interested in asserting my selfhood through difference.

*

While I flirted with abandoning Kashrut in high school, I officially deserted tradition once I arrived at university in Montreal. My first unkosher months weren’t especially guilt-ridden; if anything, it was the closest I had felt to coming of age. I could indulge in McDonald’s with my friends after a late night out; my Friday nights were free from interminable Shabbat dinners; even selecting my menu from the prepaid meal plan felt like a radical experiment in adulthood. But if the absence of restrictions was at first freeing, soon it was merely an absence. When I first sampled poutine at a grubby student diner, I wondered how I had gone my whole life without tasting the Québécois delicacy. By my seventh or eighth visit, the globs of gravy lost their luster; guilt, it turns out, is an ingredient even more essential than cheese curds. When I realized there was no real threat of my mother strolling onto Boulevard Saint-Laurent and catching me mid-indiscretion, the greasy treat seemed more like what it was: just mozzarella splattered onto barely-thawed McCain’s potatoes.

Say what you will about the Old Testament, but at least it’s all in one place.

Freedom soon proved more frightening than liberating. In the residence dining hall one morning, a girl who lived down the hall from me snarked that my daily bowl of Froot Loops was going to “catch up with me.” I was confused: I had only ever studied cereal’s nutritional facts to determine whether they contained leavened bread, not fructose or glucose or sucrose. I was also caught off guard, surprised that someone besides my mom would bother to make observations about what I ate. I was starting to realize that the image I had of adulthood—a zone where, liberated from parental control, I could subsist on Froot Loops and poutine—didn’t really exist. Since kindergarten I had studied how the laws of Kashrut, entombed in scripture for thousands of years, should be applied in daily life. But this new dietary order fluctuated at breakneck speed—quinoa is a superfood one day and too high in carbs the next, fruits are healthy in the morning but poison after 6 p.m. Contradictory accounts of what constitutes a balanced diet permeate fitness and lifestyle magazines and flit between women as barbs impersonating wisdom. Say what you will about the Old Testament, but at least it’s all in one place.

The Bishop Mountain Dining Hall was not just a cafeteria but a panopticon, a place where decisions about whether to visit the salad bar or what sized bowl to heap pasta into had far-reaching consequences for malleable personhoods. I chose Froot Loops in the morning because it was quick and convenient and fructose tastes incredible; based on this choice, my peers intuited that I was lazy and lacked discipline, that I didn’t have a sufficiently refined palate to take advantage of the omelette bar. When I first realized God wouldn’t smite me after I snuck a slice of havarti onto a turkey sandwich, the guilt of Kashrut became more hypothetical, its consequences less immediate than my classmates’ watchful eyes. I needed guidance. So, without rabbinical scholars or Jewish day school teachers or even my parents to direct me, I became a sponge for something similarly unyielding: celebrity diet tips.

*

My most reliable party trick is that I can recite, by heart, exactly what Kelly Ripa eats in a day: no solid foods before she films her morning talk show, powdered greens to alkalize her digestive system, the same microgreen salad for lunch and for dinner. I can also tell you about how Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, and Julianne Hough stock their pantries. I’ve gleaned all this from “Food Diaries,” the Harper’s BAZAAR YouTube series that gives a voyeuristic glimpse into the kitchens of the rich and famous. Each video relies on the assumption that the featured eater prepares the exact same foods, and only those foods, every day. Harper’s BAZAAR has published over sixty-four iterations, all of which I’ve consumed with a religious fervor.

Food Diaries is an extension of body dysmorphia, diet culture, disordered eating, and other modern plights. While it doesn’t exactly advertise itself as a weight loss guide, it venerates a very particular kind of body type—usually someone who physically resembles Kelly Ripa. The videos mimic the private journals that I, like so many people, stash in secret phone memos or record in apps with infantilizing names like Noom or FitBit or MyFitnessPal, documenting our daily indulgences and calories. But most people don’t have the resources to fund gourmet meal prep, dieticians, and private gyms, or the genetic predisposition to see results like Kelly Ripa’s.

The goal of the videos, however, is not just to be thin: dieting isn’t framed as a temporary fix but a way of life. “I try not to have too many cheat meals because cheat meals lead to sort of like a cheat lifestyle,” Ripa expounds in her video. Kelly Ripa is the quintessential girlboss, an award-winning television personality with a successful production company and a well-publicized marriage that has spawned three children, who also finds time to maintain the sleek and compact build of an electric sports car. It’s difficult to get on television if you eat cheat meals, and impossible to build an empire on a cheat lifestyle, I imagine Ripa warning. But there’s more than just a slice of birthday cake standing between the average Eating Diaries viewer and morning television stardom.

My most reliable party trick is that I can recite, by heart, exactly what Kelly Ripa eats in a day.

When the girl down the hall lectured me on Froot Loops, she couched it in concern for my health; that the artificial sugars would sap my energy supply and I’d slug through the day depleted and comatose. It’ll catch up with you, if not on your hips, then in a poor job performance or a bad grade. The same girl later told me, in what felt like a Seinfeld episode, that she ended things with a pseudo-boyfriend because she woke up to him eating cereal one morning—adult men do not eat cereal, she explained. Of course I was more alert in class after I dropped the sugar cereal, but taken to its extreme, this logic suggests people are little more than the sum of their most minute habits—which can be enough to build an empire or to smother a relationship in its infancy.

The Bishop Mountain Dining Hall was the perfect storm, a stadium packed with hundreds of newly-independent eighteen-year-olds with courtside seats to monitor who picked out what and how much at the salad bar. But these conditions, while specific to a college dorm, are also infinitely reproducible. They are a microcosm for a culture in which not looking like Kelly Ripa is only acceptable if you’re doing everything in your power to try. Cheat meals equal a cheat lifestyle. But no matter how perverse and pernicious this mantra is, I still find it beguiling. For me, Ripa and Paltrow are enviable not just for their flaxen manes or designer clothes, but for the confidence with which they architect their days. It’s hard to imagine one’s life unravelling when every micro and macronutrient is accounted for. I poach an egg over avocado toast with multigrain bread for lunch everyday not just to balance whole carbs with healthy fats and protein, but because women who appear in control of their lives poach eggs and smear avocado on toast.

*

After my first year, I moved out of the dorm and into a dilapidated Victorian walk-up with four friends. Though we were no longer subject to the catwalk past the Bishop Mountain Dining Hall cash register, we continued surveilling one another surreptitiously. I stopped making sandwiches at home and began purchasing twelve-dollar kale salads from a French café in the library basement—a habit that, by the winter semester, had exhausted an inexcusable portion of the money I’d earned at a summer hotel job.

When I started going to campus Shabbat dinners for the first time in a year, it was a financial decision, meant to save time and money from having to plan meals every Friday night. But the warmth of the candlelight reminded me of home, and I regretted that I couldn’t indulge in the babka I loved as a kid. Whereas the Food Diaries model is a never-ending calculus to minimize calories and carbs, Kashrut is comparatively liberating in its aversion to reason. Kashrut and dieting are both ways to inject meaning—either spiritual or nutritional—into tedious daily rituals. But whereas every morsel that Kelly Ripa consumes has a nutritional purpose, the sweet round Challah served every Jewish New Year is only symbolic, meant to recall who and what we are.

Such notions of memory and collectivism can feel anachronistic in a culture that prizes individualism, where even the most quotidian details are fodder for digital self-curation and promotion. YouTube is rife with routines: beauty routines, exercise routines, 6 a.m. morning routines for healthy and productive habits. When the most important things you can be are seen and heard, framing your most intimate moments for public consumption is an attractive prospect, a private vigilance where ordinary people conduct themselves like reality-TV stars under constant scrutiny. In Harper’s BAZAAR, clean eating attests to your inner strength; in Kashrut, it is a constant reminder of a higher power. I’m still trying to chart my own course between these ideals. From force of habit, I’ll occasionally ask my boyfriend if it’s okay to eat something: a slice of cheesecake, an extra serving of linguine, a handful of his fries. “Who do you think you’re going to get in trouble with?” He always wants to know. The answer has shifted over the course of my life: my mom, God, Kelly Ripa, some heady combination of the three.

After I graduated from university, my mom took me out to lunch to celebrate.

“Are you kosher now?” she joked tepidly, after I asked the waiter to omit gorgonzola from my chicken salad.

“Just trying to eat better,” I shrugged. It wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

“So you’ll listen to Kate Hudson, but not God.”

Maybe I should have lied—in a practical sense, the mechanics of Kashrut are not so different from dieting. It’s not difficult to forego leavened bread during Passover when I’ve already purged refined carbs from my pantry. Kashrut forbids cuts of meat it deems inhumane or unduly painful to the animal; the chicken I eat is “farm-raised” or “grass-fed.” And both subsist on guilt, where treif bites desecrate either the temple that is your body or the house of God. Still, sitting across from my mother, no longer the enemy she had been when I was sixteen, I found myself wishing my aversion to blue cheese had spiritual significance. And I was grateful that, while so many of my friends’ mothers passed along calorie counters and spandex like treasured family heirlooms, mine was always far less concerned with the state of my body than she was my soul.

It’s been seven years now since I’ve kept kosher, and while I should probably know better, Food Diaries retains an intoxicating allure. It taunts me, promising that if I practice as Ripa and Paltrow preach, I too might maintain a gymnast’s physique well into my fifties, a prospect almost enticing enough to justify the $130/month price tag for Ripa-endorsed supplements. Still, when I’m far away from home and miss my mother, I notice myself refraining from pork and googling “Kosher butchers near me.” When I discovered a Kosher deli while studying abroad in the Czech Republic, I was reminded of all the people who have taken desperate measures to maintain tradition; when I slice into an avocado, I think only of myself and my own caloric intake. Because vanity is limited to the self, it will always grow boring. But to submit yourself to something bigger, to a history of people following rules for arcane reasons, can be exhilarating.

• 0