IN THE HOSPITAL, WE CATER TO YOUR NEEDS

I would tell you that I am in excellent health. In fact, I have recently lost 32 kg, but don’t tell the editor! But, if you’d ask my doctors, you’d be certain that I have one foot in the grave: a pacemaker, diabetes, high blood pressure, s small stroke and other assorted maladies.

You may thus assume that I am familiar with hospital life. You should not be surprised that I had one of my perennial visits to the hospital just last week for a minor procedure.

All went well, thank God, and the cuisine was expectedly miserable. I would have considered it normal were it not for the obnoxious message on my dinner tray, “Our goal is to enhance your dining experience by offering you personalized service and warm hospitality that you deserve and we deliver. We’re here to cater to you.”

That “we cater to you” baloney busted my gut. So, I decided to put them to the test. I simply requested my normal diet: my meals should be vegetarian (in Greenville, kosher is too much to expect), soft and dietetic.

On their first attempt at dinner, the attendant brought mashed potatoes, dietetic pudding and a slice of . . . meatloaf, because “it was soft.” On the second try, she brought fried fish, with ice cream for dessert. The fried fish, she reasoned, was softer than the alternative, fried chicken. The third time, she presented vegetables cooked to mush in a ham-flecked stock.

Obviously, neither Jesus nor his Disciples, who observed kashrut and after whom the hospital was named, were watching over me. Linda finally walked in, and after we stopped laughing over my culinary plight, she ran home for some of her matzo ball soup, potato kugel and gefilte fish.

In the aftermath, I tried to think of even one indigenously Jewish food that was was not “soft.” Kugel? Matzo balls? Gefilte fish? The only “hard” Jewish food that I could recollect was crunchy matzo. Matzo? Didn’t the goyim eat that at the Last Supper? Aha! Something else we stole from them! It’s all part of an international Jewish conspiracy. What will be next? Lox and bagels?