By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

When looking at the selection of yogurt that covers one-quarter to one-third of almost every grocery store dairy section, it may be difficult to imagine that yogurt was once considered a hippy-dippy, counter-culture food. I know that because my mom ate yogurt decades before it became popular. At one point, she ate so much that she made her own. 
I just looked online and many yogurt markers are available, although I’m betting people would rather just buy the prepared stuff in the store. When my mom used to eat it, there was no Greek yogurt, the product that helped make yogurt popular and hip. It’s interesting to note that there is nothing specifically Greek about the yogurt that appears in our grocery stores other than it’s made by a Greek dairy company. I’m going to avoid the debate about whether the product should be called that since Greece has its own version of yogurt. What I am questioning is whether yogurt should be called a Jewish food.
There is a tendency to declare that almost anything or anyone in the world has a Jewish connection. In the case of yogurt, an article on MyJewishLearning.com (www.myjewishlearning.com/the-nosher/the-jewish-history-of-yogurt/) treats yogurt as a specifically Jewish food. However, just because it might have been mentioned in the Bible, that doesn’t mean it is a specifically Jewish food. For all we know, the curds that Abraham gave his guests might have been a variation on cottage cheese and those curds might have been eaten by everyone in Canaan, not just Abraham’s family. The article also lists Jews who have used yogurt over the ages in everything from holiday recipes to medicine, but that still begs the question: Is it a specifically Jewish food?
Just because Jews eat a particular food doesn’t make it Jewish. Most of what we now consider Jewish cuisine are actually Jewish variations on the food that the neighboring non-Jews ate. (That, by the way, includes challah.) What does connect a food to Jewish culture is two things: one is that the food has been adapted to fit the Jewish dietary laws (meaning no pork or shellfish, and no mixture of meat and milk). The other is that the food has been given a specific connection to Jewish culture. For example, a three-cornered cookie filled with jam becomes Jewish because, on Purim, it’s called hamantashen and said to be Haman’s three cornered hat (or ear, depending on which tradition you prefer). A mixture of fruit and nuts that was a palate cleanser in ancient Greece becomes Jewish on Passover when it’s called charoset and said to represent the mortar Jewish used when they were slaves in Egypt.
I love that Judaism has taken what would be ordinary food and elevated it by declaring it represents something more than just nutrition. That is what makes a food Jewish, not the fact that Jews have consumed it over the ages.