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Mary Berry, Queen of ... Seder!

I bet even Britain’s ’Mary, Queen of Cakes’ will be surprised to learn she’s become the star attraction of Jewish social media threads during the current 2019 Passover week.

This time, though, it’s not because of a no-fail cake recipe, but because of a non-dairy vegetable lasagne that is suitable year-round for a kosher diet and that I altered to make it appropriate for the traditional ‘seder’ dinner by substituting pasta strips with matza sheets. I softened these slightly without soaking them by passing them through running cold tap water before placing them on the dish.

Any readers here interested in having a go, either with pasta or matza. wil find the original recipe in the vegetarian section of this whopping cookey encyclopedia - always a pleasure to use.

Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook is available from Amazon on Kindle and in hardback.

© Natalie Wood (22 April 2019)

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Not Hear! It’s Them!

Hurrah! In April last year, famed British actor Dame Judi Dench won yet more plaudits – for telling some home truths!

She was not on stage but was unveiling a ‘blue’ memorial plaque at the long-time home of fellow thespian, Sir John Gielgud when she lamented the current generation of apathetic, lazy young actors whom she accused of ignoring their artistic heritage and of mumbling their speeches.

They seemed not to care whether they could be heard speaking, she said. She could have added that the same may be said of those appearig on stage and in movies along with television shows.

Now this past week, the health newsletter produced by the UK Saga company for seniors highlighted the problems many television viewers experience while attempting to hear what they watch!

Below are the edited highlights:

· Lack of speech clarity

· Unfamiliar and impenetrable accent or dialect

· Poor audio recordings

· Overloud background music and background noise

· A poor quality television set

· Domestic background noise

The feature first published in 2013 is by consumer journalist Siski Green who is unable to resist adding that it may all be viewers’ own fault!

“If you are worried that you may have hearing loss, see your GP (family doctor). You may simply have wax build-up or have suffered some damage to your ear that is causing the problem. And if you do have hearing loss, you can discuss the possibility of finding a hearing aid that would work best for you”.

You don’t say!

But what about when you possess said aids and you still can’t understand what’s being said, even as part of an often over amplified recording at a movie theatre?

I think I prefer to take advice from Dame Judi any time!

© Natalie Wood (29 August 2018)

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Fat Phobia: A Web of Guilt, Self-Hate and Fear

When Anglo-Jewish journalist Hilary Freeman revealed she had decided not to enrol her infant daughter at a particular London nursery because she believed its obese staff may make poor role models, she suffered the consequences for weeks.

Freeman, a seasoned free-lancer, predictably lost her position as the advice columnist for The Jewish Chronicle and received the sort of hate mail that should have had those who wrote it sent before the courts.

Freeman mentioned that she had always struggled with her own weight, so it seemed clear that she had judged the rejected nursery’s staff just because they reflected her own worst self-image.

So I wonder how she’s considered the recent success of Israeli Eurovision Song Contest winner, Netta Barzilai whose astounding physical presence is matched only by her giant ego - and who worked inter alia as a kindergarten teacher and babysitter before achieving fame.

Indeed, Barzilai said during an interview for The Independent: “I wasn’t allowed to be poppy at first because y’know in my mind, pop stars are thin and beautiful and light, and I’ve never felt beautiful, skinny and light … People are locked in this state of mind and when I decided that this [Netta gestures to herself] is who I am then that was that”.

During one of two highly emotional features devoted to obesity, Freeman recalled her doctor saying that her body was designed to withstand a famine. This was surely a ‘eureka’ moment; an explanation for the disproportionate number of Jewish people who are overweight and often suffer from common related health problems. Like all our mid-eastern non-Jewish first cousins we began as nomads. If we accept the stories of the Torah, matters darkened during 40 years in the wilderness and later, 2,000 years in exile with long periods of privation when, even as recently as post-Holocaust Europe, there were too many times when as refugees, Jewish people did not know if and how they would next eat.

What they did eat were too often the cheapest high fat, sugar and carbohydrate foods that produce the type of inherited ‘false’ obesity I’ve spotted many times in Karmiel among the local immigrant community from the Former Soviet Union.

Add to this the dictates of a kosher diet, routine large Sabbath dinners with the other regular feasts of the Jewish calendar and attendant life-cycle events, it is unsurprising that all manner of Jews have a near obsession with what they consume – even when it is not food.

Here I am thinking of the recent apparent suicide of celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain, whose mother, Gladys (née Sacksman) is Jewish and whose various obituaries have described a man somehow less concerned with food than devouring all that life offered and who, finally, died from an addiction to excess.

So I find it unremarkable that when his mother apocryphally once sprayed classic Jewish guilt over him by declaring ‘I love you even when I don’t like you’ that he went on to live life on the run!

But all this is by way of preamble to discussing Leave Me Alone **, an astute study of how morbid obesity affects young people and how its basis is not just physical but part of a deeply etched psychosis triggered by events outside the patients’ control.

The author is prize-winning Israeli clinical psychologist Orit Zeevi Yogev who established a hotline for those experiencing obesity related mental distress and who says her book was written partly to “express the pain of those whom the world refuses to see past their weight”.

Yogev describes real cases and so heavily disguises her patients. This technique may make it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction but it does not stop each story ringing all too horribly true.

Leave Me Alone is a book that slices through the thick layers of Israel’s societal, cultural and economic divides - and is all the more powerful and important for that.

Be it the boy who was regularly sodomised by the husband of a family maid; the son of an authoritarian IDF brigadier caught between his warring parents or the Arab girl held down by her widowed mother while a predatory uncle raped her, all these desperate kids are consumed by an insatiable even insensible food-fuelled fury inspired by their desire to escape the prison of adult control.

It seems that fat people are universally hated; the risible scapegoat for every social ill. After all, they appear disfigured, waddle rather than walk and generally behave in such an awkward, ugly way that they make those in their company feel embarrassed; assume that their size means they lack self-control; indeed any emotional hinterland, so making them prey to any and every insult, especially from those who are supposed to know and love them best.

The verbal, emotional abuse of a parent disappointed that a child has not fulfilled their own ambitions may be as harsh as physical violence. So I am relieved that Yogev places the blame equally on parents and those fellow medics whom she accuses of “insulting and humiliating behaviour …. A cover for fat phobia which is rooted in a complex of guilt, self-hate and fear; the person who rejects the fat person is afraid it will happen to them too”, she writes.

Not all Yogev’s patients have become super svelte but generally they have greatly reduced their former massive weight, maintained their new size and so have restored their sense of self-worth.

I consider the author’s book – like her work - to be priceless and I thank her very much.

** Leave Me Alone: A Glance into Obesity, Physical Overweight and the Endless Struggle to Lose Weight is available from Amazon @ $3.99 (Kindle) and $13.95 (Paperback).

© Natalie Wood (16 June 2018)

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