Deuteronomy 14

As if we haven’t heard this enough, Moses reiterates the dos and don’ts of Jewish cuisine, plus a few random no-nos. I’d think that people living in deserts wouldn’t have the luxury of being so picky, but to each his own, especially when God’s pointing his big angry finger at you.

Let's hit the bullets:

·  When someone dies, don't cut yourselves or shave the front of your head. That means Peter Gabriel is in a lot of trouble

·  Eat only oxen, sheep, goat, hart (which are a kind of deer), roebuck (which are male deer), wild goats, pygarg (which may be antelopes), wiled oxen, and chamois (which are large mountain goats; no word on whether or not it's kosher to use a ShamWow)

·  Handy rule: you can eat any animal that has a cloven hoof and chews a cud; both traits are necessary. That means no camel (chews cud but has an undivided hoof) or pig (divided hoof but doesn't chew cud). Maybe someday geneticists will create a pamel, a gigantic pig with bacon humps, spindly legs, and the head of a camel. It just seems a shame that there are so many people in the world who cannot eat bacon

·  Don't touch the carcass of an unclean animal. Now that I think about it, just leave carcasses alone. That's just gross

·  Anything in the water with scales and fins you can eat; anything else from the water is unclean, which means mermaids are fair game

·   Birds in general are cool

·  Except for eagles, ossifrages (bearded vultures), ospreys, gledes (birds of prey, especially kites), kites (see gledes), other vultures, ravens, owls, night hawks, cuckoos, other hawks, a couple of other owls, swans, pelicans, another eagle, cormorants, storks, herons, lapwings, and bats

·  God's not really into taxonomy

·  Don't eat insects. Do you even have to be told that?

·  Don't eat anything that you found already dead

·  Yes, road kill counts, Kentucky

·  You can give away found dead meat to strangers though. Who cares what they eat? They're going to hell already because they don't believe in Jesus

·  Don't cook a kid goat in its mother's milk. You don't have to tell me twice. Milk-boiled meat sounds nasty

I just had a great idea: a restaurant that not only doesn’t keep kosher but one that deliberately doesn't keep kosher. The menu would offer only those items specifically mentioned in the bible as being unclean. I even have a name: Uncloven Hoof. Sounds like a hate crime waiting to happen.

One last thing: tithe. That's offering ten percent of your crops and animals to the Lord. Every year take your tithe to a place of God's choosing, let's say Boca Raton, and eat it all in front of the Lord. If you tithe is so large you can't transport it all, sell it for silver, travel to the eating place, and then buy some food with the money when get you get there. McDonald’s counts.

Because the Levites are forbidden to own land, every three years all the tithes should be donated to them instead of eaten by the members of the individual tribes, which makes the Levites the original welfare queens.