Kugels and Chulent Only!
Over at Jewlicious Y-Love alerts us to a bizarre new modesty issue in the haredi community: an unnecessarily wide variety of food. Vos Iz Neias reports:
Brooklyn, NY - Over the past several years, the Chasidic community of Williamsburg has experienced several incidents in which anonymous community activists destroyed, damaged or defaced advertising or signage of various business establishments.
The motivation behind the incidents is spiritual. Ads featuring highly detailed images of tantalizing food—and businesses hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food, such a the now-shuttered Sub on Wheels once parked along a Williamsburg street—are seen as excessive and indulgent by austerity-minded activists, who are alarmed by what they see as an intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into their community.
Does anyone else get the feeling that someone in the haredi world is taking the term ‘food porn’ a little too seriously? 
I can only imagine what would happen if some really good food photography made its way to Brooklyn. Watch out Smitten Kitchen and Not Derby Pie—the hasids are coming!
Also, I love that it’s the variety of food that’s threatening. It’s like somebody’s wife got jealous that somebody else’s wife was making some kind of sushi and laid it on thick with the rav. More options than chulent and kugel? That’s SO un-tznius. From now on only the old standards photographed Mackerel Pudding style.
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The Jew and the Carrot » Blog Archive » Is Good Food Excessively Indulgent?
Member Since: Jan 1970 Posts: 218
[…] The issue here is that some businesses are “hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food” which is apparently a symptom of a larger problem: the “intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into [the Williamsburg] community.” I want to first say that my gut reaction here is just to write all of this off as completely ridiculous and move on. In fact, I’m already on the record with what accounts to a snort and an eye roll. […]