I am going to help you understand the impact of food on human history... Jewish food.

What is your favorite food?

Would you kill for it?

Then you are not Jewish.

They say some people live to eat and others eat to live. For Jewish people, living is synonymous with eating. They are one and the same. Jewish women have babies just so they can feed them. Believe me, there is no pleasure like watching a child sip a milk shake through a straw. Those little cheeks going in and out, the rapt look of ecstasy. Wonderful! It makes all that sex, the difficult birth, even the stitches worth it.

Our country is a melting pot and I think that is a very good thing. However, even the best social change has its cost. The price of the intermingling of races and cultures is the loss of ethnic identity in the foods we eat. Soda Bread isn’t Irish, paprikash Hungarian, even strudel has no nationality anymore

Take the bagel:

Nowadays you can buy large, fluffy bagels, small flavored bagels, high protein bagels, low fat bagels, rye ones, raspberry ones, even chocolate ones. Everyone likes bagels and they eat them for every meal. Even a baby can eat a bagel…. before he has his teeth.

That’s not the way it was when I was a girl. Way back then Gertrude Stein was my Home economics teacher. She taught me that a bagel is a bagel is a bagel. ..there is only one kind: and that kind was solid as stone. We boiled little circles of dough until they were the consistency of granite, spread cream cheese or butter on them and heated them until they were soft enough to bruise slightly with our incisors.

Beware the ignorant soul who tried to eat a bagel cold! It could not be done. My grandfather came home one day, grabbed a bagel from my bubbie’s counter and bit into it without any preparation. He had to wear dentures for the rest of his life.

When they told Marie Antoinette that the peasants had no bread, she did NOT say, let them eat cake.” It was she who recognized the immense discipline power of the bagel and she said, “LET THEM EAT BAGELS, then they will appreciate the texture of cake.”

(A little known tidbit omitted from our history books)

When you consider the matzo you see another example of the amazing ingenuity of the Chosen People. The Pharaoh sent us out on the desert with nothing but a little flour and water and what did we create on those hot stones in the blazing Negev? Did we create weapons to fight our oppressors?

We did not.

Did we find a way to shield ourselves from the blazing heat?

Indeed not.

We created Matzos and it was that unleavened bread that saved us to become the bankers, doctors and violinists we are today. We left our bagels behind for the Egyptians. Poor fools! They tried to eat them, ignorant warriors that they were. They instantly lost their teeth and could no longer chew their grapes. Instead, they were forced to mash them into wine. That is why their army became completely disorganized and we won the war.

From those matzos came MATZO BALLS. Today’s matzo balls are light fluffy items that float in chicken soup like meringues sail across a floating island. What a change! The matzo balls of my youth were so dense that if they were not ladled carefully into the bowl, they cracked the china and all the soup leaked on your lap. This caused extreme embarrassment at a Seder, I can tell you. As a matter of fact, my Aunt Hazel’s matzo balls were so solid she sold the recipe to The Winchester Ammunition Company during World War I. She was personally responsible for slaughtering millions of Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. They gave her a medal for it and a free pass to Lindy’s Restaurant where their matzo balls where solid as hers.

The staple of all Jewish cooking is SCHMALTZ . Schmaltz is Jewish lard. No one gets very excited about a lot of pig fat but EVERYONE gets jazzed up when they think about schmaltz. It is delicious on its own and it is the secret ingredient that makes every Jewish child beg for second helpings. It takes a Jewish Mama to create Schmaltz from nothing but a glob of chicken fat. Schmaltz is so viscous that a friend of mine rubbed it on her face to make her skin soft and wrinkle free. And it worked! The only problem was that she had to do weekly waxing to get rid of the feathers.

Schmaltz has powerful magnetic qualities. It has been known to actually move food from the platter to your plate. My sister who weighed 300 pounds at birth, loved potato pancakes. I can still remember the day she ate 41 potato pancakes and when we finished counting and looked at her plate, there were ten new ones waiting to be eaten. “HOW DID THOSE LATKES GET ON YOUR PLATE?” exclaimed my astonished mother.

“I don’t know,” my sister said. “They just slid there all by themselves.”

When schmaltz is in a soup, your bowl is never empty. That is why it is said that the eternal light was fueled by a soupcon of schmaltz. What else could keep a flame burning for eight days with such a heavenly aroma?

And that is just a taste of how traditional Jewish cuisine has shaped our civilization and changed the temperament of the world. Eating anything from a kosher table guarantees a smile on your face as you prematurely pass on to the other world from blocked arteries, strokes and premature heart attacks. You actually dance through the pearly gates on your varicose veins and throw your insulin to the devil as you shout to St. Peter, “Lead me to the blintzes….I am ready for them at last.”