meg@sii.UUCP (Marta Greenberg) (02/23/84)
All the talk about kosher restaurants brings a related question to my mind. Primarily directed to people who do keep kosher: how strict are you both at home and outside the home? Do you ever eat non-kosher meals? I hope I'm not inviting flames on my upbringing, but this is not an absurd question (I expect people who are very serious about kashrut might wonder about it). I was raised in a somewhat religious but not strict Conservative home. It was a kosher home, but there were exceptions. We were not particularly well off so we didn't eat out much, but when we did, we didn't go to kosher restaurants (actually, with four kids, McDonalds and Big Boy's were about it). We could order beef and chicken, but not pork. In the middle of my grade school years, my dad became a travelling salesman and was on the road several nights during the week. I doubt he went to many kosher restaurants on the road. Eventually (my junior high years) it became even less strict. My mom had gone back to work by then and sometimes non-kosher food was brought home (Kentucky Fried Chicken take-out, a meat tv dinner). The kosher dishes weren't used, but the food was eaten. Neither of parents liked it much, but we kids loved the stuff. Still no pork though. This is not to say that we had abandoned kashrut. But we lapsed sometimes. Now, after all the kids have left home my parents have gone back to strictly kosher food in the home. But they still eat out sometimes at non-kosher places, and they order beef and fowl. Of us kids, one brother keeps kosher, and now he's stricter than my folks. He will also eat out at a non-kosher restaurant but he won't order meat, only milk products, eggs, and fish. He's following the pattern of a couple of friends from college who kept kosher but ate out similarly. My other siblings and I don't keep kosher at all. So, my question again is how strict do others follow kashrut? Marta Greenberg, Software Innovations, decvax!ittvax!sii!meg