No soup for you

Some racist-types in France--in Dreyfus's ancestral region, as it happens--have decided to distribute "pork soup" to the poor. Caring for one's own is good and all, but the whole "we belong and you don't" angle is, well, off-putting. Sort of like a dish described alternately as "pork chowder" and "community soup." From the EJP:

Every Wednesday for the past six weeks the southern regionalist group Soulidarieta (solidarity) has been distributing the foodstuff at locations close to soup kitchens.

Soulidarieta is ideologically linked to the extreme right movement Identity Bloc. While serving soup the militants are also giving-out leaflets with the words: “ours before the others!”.

Last Saturday, a second nationalist group “Alsace Solidarity” launched a similar initiative in Strasbourg, giving out a pork chowder they call “community soup”.

“We put pork in the soup because we live in France, a country where pork has always had a major place in the citizens’ food,” says a leaflet distributed by Soulidarieta.

While the intent of the pork soup is clearly both anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish (not to mention anti-vegetarian), it's also unclear how many French foods, even with less offensive-sounding names, would be both halal and kosher. Little or not-so-little bits of shellfish or pork (everything from broth to shortening) find their way into most dishes. Even many traditional French cheeses are not kosher, depending on the rennet used. And if the dishware isn't kosher, then it doesn't matter if the dish in question is 300% vegan, still not kosher.

So there are two issues at stake: that the soup is not technically kosher or halal, and that the choice of dish was meant to offend. Which brings up the question of how many French Jews (I don't know enough about halal to discuss that angle) are semi-kosher, say, avoiding pork and shellfish but eating in restaurants, or eating everything but meat when dining out. Varying degrees of kashrut, such that many more Jews steer clear of pork and shellfish than have homes that a rebbe would agree to eat in, make it so that "pork soup" affects Jews specifically, as a people, rather than just the Jewish religion as followed by strict adherents. Again, I don't know the specifics of halal well enough to say whether this also holds for Islam.

My suggestion? Given that this trend began in Nice, it only seems fitting to let them eat salade nicoise.