My Pesach Problem

A long time ago, during a kinder and gentler era, I began to eat as a vegetarian. I was not trying to make a radical environmental statement, I just wished to eat in a more healthy way and consume a little lower on the food chain. Over the years and decades my body adapted to my new diet and for most of the year my family and I consume no meat,…except for Pesach.

There are those that will argue that you are required to eat meat on Shabbas, because the Gemara states that meat brings joy to the heart. I find that a well-prepared vegetarian meal can cause plenty of joy, especially when followed by a really rich dairy dessert (something you can’t have if you just ate the fleishig meal) ((because let’s be honest here, dairy substitutes taste like cardboard and have an unpleasant chalky consistency)).

Yes, there is a whole range of vegetables, grains, and spices that can be eaten once you get beyond the Ashkenaz idea, and my apologies to you if you are a big cholent fan, that the only vegetables to cook with are, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage, and the way to prepare them is to boil them for six or more hours until they all have the same flavor and texture.

Plenty of variety to choose from…except for Pesach. Because if you follow Ashkenaz minhag then about the only thing that you actually can eat on Pesach is meat. Sephard minhag permits rice and beans, and the Gemara actually states in accordance with this. But somewhere in time the Ashkenaz rabbis decided that during Pesach someone might get so crazed for dinner rolls that they would take some beans, but them through a grain mill, knead a dough of the resulting bean flour, leaven it, bake it, and eat some bean bread during Pesach. Believe me when I tell you, someone who would go to all that trouble is just going to head down to the gentile bakery and buy some warm, fluffy, wheat bread, fresh from the oven.

Since beans, rice, corn, peanuts, mustard??, and their derivatives are all forbidden, that leaves us with meat, and every Pesach we place an on-line order for several freezer chests full of meat, and since we live way out in the country the air freight costs are so high that it would probably be cheaper to buy an entire cow from the local farmers and shecht it myself.

After eating only vegetables for the previous 50 or so weeks introducing meat as the main dietary staple necessitates some digestive adjustment. And every year I feel each and every inch of the entire 26 feet of my intestines being readjusted...slowly.

So if any nice Sephardic family out there would like to adopt us before Pesach…