Moving to a new suburb or city is tough; moving to a new country and unknown city is even tougher. Luckily, I already know a lot of people here, so I am not too worried about making friends. I anticipate that the biggest challenge of moving will be integrating my lifestyle choices- to be kosher and eat healthy – into my new life in Canberra. When I last lived in Australia, I wasn’t keeping kosher or observant, and I’m still not sure how my best friends will react. They all know that I’ve become more observant, but I’ve been living 14,000+ km’s away for five years and the practical implications for my social life haven’t been particularly relevant to them. Until now..
I’m quite apprehensive about it, and have yet to explain fully what these lifestyle choices mean in the context of my relationships. Most of my friends here are not Jewish, so there are actually quite a few things to be aware of, but so far I haven’t had to explain much – in other words, no one has asked us to dinner yet!
Unfortunately, before I can even worry about that, we need to figure out what we actually can eat. In our own (temporary) kitchen. Yes, we don’t have anywhere to live, and that’s obviously a pressing concern, but more importantly, we aren’t familiar with which supermarket items are kosher or not, so we don’t even know what we can buy. And yes, I used to live here, and was involved with the Jewish world, but knowing what was kosher ten years ago is not exactly helpful- some of those brands don’t even exist anymore!
So what to do?
Well, any fruits and vegetables are fine to eat, and we still have some muesli bars and tinned fish we brought with us, so we we have started by eating that.
We don’t have kosher plates and cutlery where we are (ah, the glory of international moves!), so we have bought a temporary set of plastic plates and cutlery to use until we figure out how to tovel. We also bought a knife for my friend Tristan which we have kept until we return to him- that’s a workaround for not being able to get to an appropriate place where we can tovel our dishes yet! Yes, buy your non-Jewish friends an item and borrow it from them temporarily. (Note: we were later told that this works for a one-time use of a metal or glass object only, we will be investigating this further.)
We also bought some plastic tupperware so that I can make salads at work, an excellent idea for summer, and for when we don’t have any food options!
How are we making this a sustainable choice? We are both very concerned with the environment in addition to being kosher and wanting to eat healthy. It’s the last piece of the puzzle, and what makes our trifecta of necessary eating conditions.
Unfortunately, using plastic cutlery and plates isn’t great for the environment. In fact, we would much prefer more permanent eating tools. Part of the problem is a lack of access to a mikvat kelim, or a place to immerse our dishes. The other thing is that we actually already own lots of dishes- they’re just stuck on a boat (currently in the Suez Canal*) on their way to us, and we don’t want to spend a lot of money buying more. Then there’s also the fact that we are moving around from AirBnb to AirBnb every few days and we don’t want to carry lots of heavy plates with us..
Our plan with the plastics is to reuse and keep reusing! We have been washing up our plastics every time and haven’t thrown anything away yet. In addition, we’ve tried to minimise our plastic packaging, buying our fruit and vegetables as is, where possible.
Our next priority is figuring out what else is kosher since we are running out of the food we brought from overseas and toveling our dishes! But until then, instant oatmeal and tuna salad for every meal!
* We later discovered that we’d been tracking the journey of the wrong boat, which made sense, because the Suez anal is not on the way to Australia from North(East) America and the boat carrying our furniture was (thankfully) not very adventurous..
