So preserving Jewish food, that sounds like dill pickles, or, how can I say, freeze drying?

And that's not what we want to do with Jewish food. What we want to do with Jewish food is, we want a living tradition. And the best way to have a living tradition is what I would call intergenerational transmission, and that is to learn in the face to face encounter with people who cook, who know how to cook, and hopefully who learned how to cook from others who learned how to cook from others. So live transmission is the best, of course, where that's not possible, there's always research, there's always cookbooks, recipes, instructions. But sharing, I would say, embodied knowledge of these food ways, and not only the methods of cooking, but also the customary practices, meanings, associated with them. That, for me, is what this is all about. One of the most interesting places where I see this happening is on a Facebook page called Children of the Holocaust Cookbook. These are the children of survivors, and, maybe it's just a kind of self-selected group. But these are people who are really, really close to all-time East European Jewish cooking. And they are reflecting what they learned from their mothers, and grandmothers, to the degree that their grandmothers survived. And they share their knowledge. And they also say, does anybody remember such and such? Do you know how to make this? I remember eating it, or I remember my mother making it, but I don't know how.

And so there is a sharing of knowledge and experience and memories that gives a kind of a richness to these food ways. When we no longer have access to people who know how to make these foods from their own sort of living cultural practices, we really have no option than to go to cookbooks. In that instance, I would say that then we need to curate the cookbooks. We really need to know and be able to identify those cookbook authors who are working from experience and not simply from other cookbooks, so that we don't end up with a Jewish cookbook cuisine, but ratherwith a Jewish cuisine that is more closely linked to the human practices of those who once lived day-to-day, with this way of cooking and eating. We're talking about preservation of Jewish foods, but actually we should be talking about an interest in cooking and eating Jewish food. And what are the barriers? Well, first of all, who's cooking? To some degree today, many people, if they're going to cook at all, it's recreational cooking, it’s something they might do on the weekend. The interest in food today is also very high, whether or not people want to cook. But if they are going to cook, the world is their oyster. They can cook anything.

They have an enormous range of cooking appliances and implements and raw ingredients and cooking shows. They have a huge range of restaurants, cuisines, they travel. So when you have so many choices, why would you choose to cook Jewish? And if you were to choose to cook Jewish? So, what might be impediments? Well, there's an image problem that the food is heavy, that it's greasy, that it's starchy, salty, that it's not healthy. And of course, that suggests a very, very limited knowledge of the extraordinary range and beauty of this cuisine, which is very seasonal, which makes full use of the vegetables of the season, all those wonderful root vegetables in the winter and, of course, a whole range of vegetables, berries, fruits, whole grains in the summer and also in partly the rest of the year. That negative image, I think, is something that we would have to really work on by bringing awareness to a much wider diversity of ingredients, methods of preparation and cuisine. That would be the second issue, one issue having to do with, some people just don't cook. The second that if they're going to cook, they have so many options. The third is this, this image problem. And then the fourth, I would say, which is related to it, are the health conscious, from the most extreme vegan. By the time you've eliminated meat and dairy and honey and eggs, you've actually eliminated some very fundamental parts of the, if you will, of the Jewish kitchen.

So I think that changes in dietary habits, changes in culinary sophistication, changes in whether or not one cooks, and also whether or not one sits down with a family, or with others, to actually eat a meal together, as opposed to take-out, eating-on-the-run, having food delivered. All of those aspects of lifestyle can also be an impediment. It might be that the Jewish kitchen survives only on the holiday table, only in relation to Passover and the Sabbath and perhaps in relation to some of the other holidays. I would say, if there's any chance, it'll be on the Passover table. And in fact, in those early Jewish cookbooks, if there is a Jewish section or if you will, if there are Jewish recipes, they're most likely to appear in a section dedicated to Passover. And so it's not just about, quote, preserving Jewish food in the sense of knowing how to make gefilte fish, or knowing how to make a challah, or knowing how to make stuffed cabbage, or kreplach, or whatever it might be. But it's rather cultural. And the transmission from person to person is, to my way of thinking, the single best way.