Departures

“Which means lower cost to the farmer?” someone asked.

“Exactly.”

“But of course buying your R strain is going to be more expensive for the farmer. What’s the net savings?”

Delahanty turned to a chart behind him.”Here you have costs for the R strain compared to those for ordinary swine. As you can see, the break-even point is at three and a half months if the farmer buys piglets; it’s even sooner if he chooses to have fertilized ova implanted in his own sows. And the extra expense is all in the first generation; the R strain breeds true.”

“Will they interbreed with unmodified pigs?” a man with a gray mustache wondered.

“No,” Delahanty said. “There may be matings, but no offspring from them. The genetic changes are too great for inter-fertility.”

Another woman had a question: “How hardy are your new pigs? Can they survive the poor treatment they may get, say, in a Third World country?”

“At least as well as any other pigs,” Delahanty said firmly. “Probably better, since they’ll thrive on less food. One of the reasons Genetic Enterprises developed the R strain was to provide more protein for overpopulated developing nations.”

He fielded more queries about costs, and several on the genetic engineering techniques that had gone into Lionel and his ilk. After half an hour or so, the reporters’ ingenuity flagged. Finally, though, someone asked the question Delahanty had been hoping for: “What do these beasts of yours taste like?”

He smiled. “I’ll let you all be the judges of that. The chops and hams on the buffet to my left here come from the R strain. If there aren’t any more questions-”

The surge forward was so sudden and urgent that Lionel snorted in alarm. But somebody was still waving a hand-not a reporter but a cameraman, a fellow with curly brown hair and a big nose. “Yes? You want to ask me something?” Delahanty called.

“Yeah, if I could,” the man said. “My name’s Stan Jacoby. Here’s what I want to know…”

Delahanty had been ready for every question the reporters, and a good many they hadn’t. Now, though, he felt his jaw drop. “Mr. Jacoby,” he said in the most spontaneous answer of the press conference, “I’ll be goddamned if I know.”

The phone rang three times before Ruth picked it up. “It’s for you, dear,” she shouted.

Rabbi Aaron Kaplan muttered something unrabbinic that his wet beard mercifully swallowed. “Unless it’s an emergency, get a number and say I’ll call back,” he called over the hiss of the shower. He expected to be dragged out dripping-when did anyone calling a rabbi not think it was an emergency?-but he got to finish bathing in peace.

Somewhat mollified, he surveyed himself in the steamy bathroom mirror as he dried off. There were gray threads in the beard and a bald spot at his crown, but his stocky frame had not changed too badly since his days as a high school linebacker twenty-five years before.

Ruth came in with a scrap of paper. He smiled at her, thinking how lucky he was; if she had not been a rabbi’s daughter, she would have been a rebbitzin decorative enough to make half his congregation nervous.

At the moment, she was giggling. “What’s so fu

He laughed. “A practical joke?”

“I don’t think so. He seemed very sincere.”

“Well, all right, I’ll call him. He’s got chutzpah, if nothing else.” Kaplan went into the bedroom, put on a T-shirt and pair of shorts. Not for the first time, he was glad he hadn’t added video to his phone system.

He punched the number. “Genetic Enterprises, Dr. Delahanty’s office,” a woman said. He asked to speak to Dr. Delahanty. “May I ask who’s calling?” the secretary said. When he gave his name, she answered, “One moment. I’ll co

“Oh, Rabbi Kaplan. Thanks for returning my call.” Delahanty sounded young and earnest. If he was a practical joker, he was first-rate.

Kaplan said, “My wife tells me you were inquiring about the possibility of, uh, pork being acceptable under Jewish dietary law.”

“Yes, that’s right. You see-”

Kaplan cut him off. “I’m afraid it’s out of the question. Leviticus 11:3 and 11:7 are the relevant passages. Here, let me give you the exact wording.” He reached for the Bible on the night-stand. “ ‘Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.’ And again, ‘And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, be is unclean to you.’ The fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy repeats the same prohibitions. So I really don’t see how-”

It was Delahanty’s turn to interrupt. “Forgive me, Rabbi Kaplan, but I do know that under normal circumstances Jews are not supposed to eat pork. Let me tell you about Lionel, though.”

“Lionel?” Kaplan echoed, confused.

“Yes. This would have been easier if you’d caught the news last night. Lionel is a pig who chews his cud… Are you there, Rabbi Kaplan?”

“I’m here,” Kaplan said after a long pause. “I think you’d better tell me more.” He felt a headache coming on.

“The easiest thing to do would have been to say that pigs is pigs, whether they chew their cuds or not. That would have been that,” Ruth said when he finally got off the phone with Delahanty and, still wearing a bemused look, explained the dilemma to her.

“Simplest, yes, but would it have been right?” Kaplan said, shaking his head. “It goes against everything I’ve been brought up with to say ‘kosher’ and ‘pig’ in the same sentence. But if a pig has a cloven hoof and chews its cud, doesn’t it meet the criteria the Bible sets for permitted beasts?”

“It meets the criteria for trouble,” his wife said practically. “If you start saying pork is kosher, you’d best thank God there’s no Jewish Inquisition, because if there were, it would burn you at the stake.”

“At the chop, actually,” said Kaplan, who had a weakness for bad puns.

Ruth did not groan, as he had hoped she would. She set her hands on her hips, saying, “I’m serious, Aaron. Do you want to make yourself a laughingstock for the congregation, to say nothing of other rabbis?”

“Of course not.” Just the same, he winced as he imagined the headlines: “Only in Los Angeles.” “Rabbi Kaplan’s Favorite Ham Recipes.” A caption under a picture of a pig: “Fu

But it was such a pretty problem. Kaplan had been a rabbi going on twenty years now: a teacher, a counselor, a preacher, a social worker, sometimes even a scholar. Not since his student days, though, had he had a chance to be a theologian.

His wife recognized his faraway stare, and it alarmed her. She chose a question close to the issue at hand: “Aaron, have you ever tasted pork?”

As she had intended, that snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at her in surprise. He was Conservative, not Orthodox; he did not pretend to observe all the minutiae of dietary law. Pork, however, was something else. It was like asking if he had ever been unfaithful-exactly like that, he thought uncomfortably.

“Once,” he admitted. “I was eighteen, in my senior year in high school, and out to do anything my father didn’t want me to do. And so, one morning I stopped for breakfast with some friends, and I ordered bacon and eggs.”

“Was it good?”

“You know, I really don’t remember.” He supposed that was like a lot of infidelity, too-he had been too nervous to enjoy it. “What’s all this about?”

“If you decide this meat could somehow be kosher, I was just wondering how you were going to react when people said you did it because you liked pork yourself and wanted an excuse to eat it.”