being porked

I have been travelling and things won’t really settle down until next week but a ridiculous 5 hour flight caught me about 6 hours from the last meal. Usually, I carry something with me rather than dine a la carte on airplane fare but yesterday was an extraordinarily chaotic day and what food I had was inadvertently tucked into my checked luggage. It didn’t help that I ran late, and by the time I got through airport security, I didn’t have an extra 20 minutes to stand in line to pick something up.

Depending on the airline and length of flight one can always request kosher meals but my experience with pre-ordering kosher meals has been at the best of times a ‘sometimes’ experience - as in sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. Anyway, here I am wasting away, when the West Jet sandwich cart comes around, and I think, I’m saved and so is the woman beside me with the extraordinarily horrid cheap perfume; if I can appease my hunger she may well be spared my wrath for the next 5 hours.

This is where I know my higher power has a sense of humor as my choices are Asian chicken/pork teriyaki in a wrap, turkey with tomatoes, mayo and bacon or…. a ham and cheese sandwich with mayo. You could always suggest I put away any religious scruples and scarp it down except I have an allergy to all pork products. It’s been a source of much entertainment to my family for years and they get great amusement recounting all my personal health horror stories from their inadvertently feeding me toxic foods. All except for my grandfather, who took it as a sign personal reproach from G-d, and in a bout of extreme guilt for producing an ‘ethnic’ Jewess granddaughter gave up pork with me.

What is it with you people and your obsession with ruining a perfectly sandwich with pork? Not only is it a personal hazard to me but stories like this one continue to surface. ABC News:

Alvarez, 37, was first referred to the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix with balance problems, difficulty swallowing and numbness in her left arm. An MRI scan revealed a foreign growth at her brain stem that looked just like a brain tumor to Dr. Peter Nakaji, a neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute.

"Ones like this that are down in the brain stem are hard to pick out," said Nakaji. "And she was deteriorating rather quickly, so she needed i Yet at a key moment during the operation to remove the fingernail-sized tumor, Nakaji, instead, found a parasite living in her brain, a tapeworm called Taenia solium, to be precise.
"I was actually quite pleased," said Nakaji. "As neurosurgeons, we see a lot of bad things and have to deliver a lot of bad news." When Alvarez awoke, she heard the good news that she was tumor-free and she would make a full recovery. But she also heard the disturbing news of how the worm got there in the first place.

Nakaji said someone, somewhere, had served her food that was tainted with the feces of a person infected with the pork tapeworm parasite. "It wasn't that she had poor hygiene, she was just a victim," said Nakaji.

Please, enough with the victim stuff, if she avoided eating the pork she would have been fine.