Sara Glick '10 has a kitchen that could make any mother proud. Color-coded dishes sit neatly in the cupboard, instead of being piled haphazardly in the sink, separated into green, white and purple. Six sponges, each one different in shape or color, ring the spotless sink, and duct tape labels assign specific duties (dairy, meat) to each shelf of the cupboard.
Yet Glick isn't just neat for neatness' sake. She owns so many dishes - and organizes them - out of religious choice. She and her three suitemates observe kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws decreed by the Torah.
The laws of kashrut are manifold, developed through rabbinical teachings, with some millennia-old and others only centuries-old. But they can be boiled down into several main rules. The Torah stipulates that Jews must only eat meat coming from animals that both chew their cud and have cloven hooves, which includes cows but excludes pigs. Birds of prey are not kosher, nor are fish without both fins and scales. Animals must be slaughtered with an unserrated blade - resulting in a painless and instant death - and their blood must be drained away, their meat soaked and salted. Meat and dairy products cannot be served at the same meal, prepared or stored together. Only cheeses prepared with rabbinical supervision and without animal enzymes involved (which most cheeses are, by a process called rennet) are allowed for consumption. These rules become even stricter during Passover.
"The kosher laws are designed for you to be thoughtful of where your food comes from," said Megan Nesbitt, executive director of Hillel. "You separate milk and meat, separate life and death."
Practicing Jews span a wide spectrum of kashrut observance. Many are secular, following no dietary laws, while some refuse to eat at any non-kosher eatery. Others fall somewhere in the middle, allowing themselves to eat vegetarian dishes at non-kosher restaurants and eating kosher meat at home or at certified kosher establishments.
'Compromise' kitchen"What we have here is a compromise between the four of us," said Glick's roommate, Rebecca Theise '10. "Some things are Jewish law, and some are just (family) tradition." The four keep meat and cheese in the same refrigerator but mark their meat pans with red dots. They buy cheeses from anywhere, she said, but they use rectangular sponges for meat dishes and blue ones for dairy. Green and white dishes are for dairy, while purple are for meat. Upon moving into their Barbour Hall suite, she said, they turned the stovetops and oven on in a cleansing process because "we would never assume that the people living before us kept kosher."
Because the four are completely off meal plan, they each spend about $120 to $150 a month on food, Glick said.
Theise is accustomed to having kosher food nearby, having come from an area of New York City with a large Jewish population. She said having a private kitchen so she could go off meal plan was appealing. Glick, however, found that being off meal plan made it more difficult to observe kashrut.
In her first two years at Brown, she ate mostly vegetarian meals at the Sharpe Refectory, consuming meat only during Friday Shabbat dinners at Hillel. Because Glick does not eat exclusively at kosher eateries - "We don't have kosher restaurants where I'm from," said the Chicago native - vegetarian dishes at Thayer Street restaurants or the Ratty sufficed, and paper plates for meat and dairy foods at Hillel eliminated the problem of separating dishes.
Now, she said, the necessity of separating meat and dairy dishes causes occasional confusion. If she wants to make pasta, Glick said, she can only use a meat pot or a milk pot. Because there is no "neutral" pot in their kitchen, the final dish must reflect the choice of cookware as long as it remains in the refrigerator.
"We keep mixing things up accidentally," Glick said.
Nesbitt agreed that keeping kosher is more difficult in Providence than it is in places with more concentrated Jewish populations.
"In New York, for instance, this is a lot easier because people have more choices," Nesbitt said. There are no kosher restaurants in Providence, according to Nesbitt, though Theise said there is a kosher butcher on Hope Street.
Brown, however, has not overlooked the needs of its kashrut-observing community. While Hillel serves dinner on Friday nights, Brown also offers an alternative meal plan.
Providence's only kosher eateryFive doors down from the Ratty's main entrance is a room to which just 28 students have access. Although it serves everyday items such as tuna wraps, lasagna and pumpkin pie, it requires a special key to enter, available only to students who have committed themselves to a different dietary path.
Ben Abiri '10 has been on the kosher and halal meal plan since his freshman year. Halal food, prescribed by Muslim dietary laws, overlaps heavily with kashrut. Unable to eat on Thayer because "nothing there is certified kosher," Abiri, a native New Yorker, found a marked difference in the ease with which he could observe kashrut in Providence.
"At almost any hour of the night, within 20 minutes, I could get any kind of kosher food," said Abiri, who hails from Long Island. "Hamburger, pizza, kebab, falafel. In my town alone, there are four, five kosher restaurants. It's all supply and demand."
Priced at $4,298 a year for 20 meals a week, the kosher meal plan is Brown's response to demand. Brown has a Jewish population of approximately 1,350 students, said Nesbitt. She estimated about 25 percent of these students observe kashrut.
The kosher meal plan has elicited mixed reviews, though many students agreed the new production manager, Rose Forrest, has improved it.
Yet it is not a cure-all. Because the kosher meal plan is only served out of the "kosher closet," as Theise dubs it, kashrut-observing students must fend for themselves once the Ratty closes at 7:30 p.m. Once, Abiri said, when he waited in the salad line at Jo's, he had to ask the staffer to open a new bag of lettuce to avoid accidentally eating something non-kosher.
Abiri, who lives in Minden Hall, does not have the luxury of having his own kitchen.
"What can I make here?" he said. "I have an illicit toaster, and even that is not enough. I can't make an omelet. ... I had kosher frozen pizza, and that was, like, such a great occasion, you know?"
"The simpler things are, the more likely they are to be kosher," Abiri said. "Stick with Jo's lettuce and dressing, and you're good. Eat a can of tuna, cry yourself to sleep afterwards."
Still, Abiri said there are ways to overcome the problem of being unable to eat the late-night burgers or quesadillas at Jo's.
"It's good to have a well-stocked pantry," Abiri said. "Peanut butter, canned tuna ... it's a combination of being creative and stocking up on food."
In spite of his main gripe with the kosher meal plan, however, Abiri said he is "happy" with it. He also said that, given the small kashrut-observing population at Brown, the University does an "exceptional" job. He said he was particularly impressed after visiting a friend at a fellow Ivy League institution.
"The Ratty rips Harvard a new one," Abiri said.
