Viking Purgatory
Leehee Goldenberg, an Israeli food blogger, is a fan of the restaurant’s style, but also describes her relationship with pork as both rapturous and guilt-ridden. “I remember when I was a little kid,” she writes on her blog, “my maternal grandfather used to reminisce about eating pork fat drippings on a piece of crusty bread—something he gave up when he married my grandmother, who came from a religious family.” Goldenberg describes being sickened when she tried pork for the first time as a teen, a condition she now says was psychosomatic. “Today, I am in love with the other white meat,” she writes. While the consumption of pork is becoming more mainstream, the production of it by Jews is still rare and sometimes still requires some justifying loopholes. Kibbutz Lahav in southern Israel, which, like many kibbutzim, started as a radically secular project, is the only one of its kind to contribute to Israel’s pork industry, albeit as a byproduct of a program to breed lab animals. Because pigs are physiologically similar to humans, they are the best animals for medical research, explains Moshe Tayar, a kibbutznik and spokesman for the kibbutz’s research institute, where they work to advance treatments for ailments ranging from diabetes to various types of cancer. Excess pigs are processed at the kibbutz factory, which sells to shops and hotels around the country.Their workers include observant Muslims and Jews who don’t eat pork themselves, explains Tayar. (In a rare example of Muslim-Jewish agreement among Israelis, Islam also views “swine” as a particularly unhygienic and thus spiritually toxic animal, and its consumption is explicitly deemed “haram,” or forbidden, in the Quran.) Because he didn’t grow up with it at home, he abstains from pork, but would never forbid his children from eating what they like. His tone is slightly hostile toward the very idea that he would do so. He says that it’s not the business “of the religious establishment or of anyone else to go into my plate, to see what I’m eating!” and adds that the raising of pigs has been a part of the community’s landscape and culture since its founding in 1952. “I believe in a pluralism of ideas, to each his own,” he says. “No one has the right to say otherwise.”
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