Misguided Culture Pathetically Enjoys Fluffy “Cheesecake”

Jerusalem, June 5 – The aftermath of the Shavuot festival has anthropologists and other scientists scratching their heads at the popularity in Israel of a sponge-like, only mildly edible cheesecake in honor of the day, when dairy is traditionally made a part of the festive menu.

Scientists observing Israeli gustatory habits remain at a loss to explain why people would voluntarily chow down on the alimentary equivalent of mattress foam and consider it a treat. The popularity of the so-called cheesecake, a variety with currency in Europe, apparently persists despite the availability of actual high-fat cream cheese with which to make a respectable cheesecake. A respectable cheesecake, say the scientists, must have the density and texture to feel as if it is adhering to the esophagus on its way down, and not be adulterated with such free radicals as fruit, nuts, or sauces.

Cream cheese abounds in Israeli stores, leading the scientists to speculate on the causes of the gustatory anomaly in a culture that otherwise exhibits remarkable good taste and a knack for fusing disparate culinary elements to achieve superior results, as evident in the exquisite varieties of hummus on every supermarket shelf. “My hunch is that the practice of eating the foam stuff is a form of asceticism,” says cultural anthropologist Phil Adelphia. “Another major custom of the holiday involves depriving oneself of sleep in order to stay up all night studying Torah. Jewish culture has always acknowledged that not everyone is capable of that level of devotion, so for the less able, that asceticism translates into consciously ingesting less-than-mediocre crap.”

Others sense a different set of factors at work. “It’s clearly more an Israeli practice than a Jewish one,” notes culinary scholar Polly Unn-Satcherett. “Jews in New York, for example, indulge in proper cheesecake, and not just on Shavuot. I rather suspect the devotion to the fluffy garbage is a manifestation of religious conservatism: their immediate ancestors lived in a less prosperous, more austere Israel, and the cuisine that emerged from that era is similarly spare. They simply began to think of ‘Shavuot cheesecake’ as that particular product, regardless of the availability of patently superior versions later on.” She cites the bones in Israeli gefilte fish as a parallel development.

Still others posit a societal blind spot, as observers sometimes see in the political realm. “I think they just convince themselves everything is OK and go about doing something that’s just a bad idea because they don’t relish the prospect of questioning their assumptions,” says European food critic Catherine Ashton. “Where would they even get an idea that fluffy cheesecake is desirable?”

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