The Purge! Also know as: Trying to clean you kitchen from all the Chametz and crying over rice, since you are Ashkenazy. A guide for Pessach for Jews and Non-Jews

As most Jews worldwide know, Pessach is around the corner, and with it comes a nice big cleaning session of the household. For the Non-jews: Pessach is a major holiday, where we remeber our ancestors fleeing from Egypt and their slavery and walking around the dessert for 40 years, before reaching The Holy Land. We remeber it for 7-8 days, depending on if you are in Israel or not (in Israel it's one day short), it's from he 15th Nissan to the 22nd in the jewish calendar, or this year from the 12-20th April in the worldy calendar. During this time there are extra rules to food. These rules differ between the different traditions, for example: I can not eat rice during this period, since I am Ashkenazy, but my good friend Tuvia can, since he is Sephardi. I also am not allowed any legumes. Or bread. I can eat potatoes. For 8 days. Potatoes. And eggs. At least I can eat many veggies and fruit. Like said, there is no bread during this time, only Mazzot. Mazzot is made of wheat, spelt, barley, rye or oat water. It can be made very finely for cakes or such and honestly, the older you get, the more you enjoy it. As a child I hated eating Mazzot, unless it was a Kneidlach. Mazze Kneidl Suppe (Soup with Mazzot Balls) is one of THE most known Ashkenazy cuisine foods. And I love it. On the first day of Pessach we have a so called "Seder", where there is a special plate with a bone, bitter herbs, an egg, we usually have a potatoe, raddish and charosset (a mix of nuts, apple, dates and wine/grapejuice to symbolise clay), some of the bitter herbs, raddish and potatoe can differ from household to household, but this is how my family does it. During the Seder we read a story and sing from it, called The Haggada, even though the word Haggada just means story or tale, with this one specifically we mean the book, telling about the time in Egypt as our ancestors ran away with Moses and his siblings Miriam and Aaron. This is a very short and quick rundown, but good enough for now. Now back to the Purge. Before the Seder we clean, like said, which also comes with different traditions. We need a candle, a wooden spoon and a feather, to find the smallest pieces of Chametz, which is for example bread or pasta, so stuff that is made by one of the 5 grains wheat, spelt, barley, rye or oat, but not made in a "Kosher LePessach" way. We use the candle to see in the dark nooks, brush the crumbs with the feather on our wooden spoon and then burn the little crumbs. This is, of course, done, after we finished the big clean. The big clean can look very different in different households, some people are very into it and clean EVERYTHING, and some don't really bother, and both is fine. For me: I started eating pasta and rice like a maniac the past couple of weeks and started to give some of my vegan stuff to friends and family, since I got too much (before you judge me: I got 20 Liter of Oat Milk with Too Good To Go, because I forgot about Pessach and wanted to save food. In general, this App made me buy an absurd amount of food, because you buy 1 package and get 30000 cookies. I am delulu enough to still claim I did good, because the food would get bad soon and you save it. As soon as passover is done I will go ham on the App again). I also started to get rid of food that was bad for, let's say it gently, some time. Which was suprisingly little amount for now, and from what I saw, there is not much food left, that hasn't been checked yet. So the Pessach Purge led to me actually using up my food at home. I barely eat outside at the moment, since I want to use what I have and it put in perspective how weird I was about food before. Maybe this is a me thing, but I often would get food from a restaurant because I was to lazy to cook or didn't even bother looking into what I had at home. Which is stupid. Food is precious. I knew that for some time but I didn't really care to think about it all too much. I wasted a lot in the last couple of years, which is unfortunate, but the only thing I can do now is do better in the future. While Pessach is not happening yet, I already started to think about how my anccestors didn't have much food. Not just the ones who fled Egypt, but the ones after them. The ones who had to flee Israel due to the Romans, the ones who had to settle down in Eastern Europe, the ones who had to live in Eastern Europe and who came to Austria, just to flee from here again. The Pessach Purge is an amazing way to start thinking about stories like this and really feel into it, what it means in general but esepcially for us. And even if you are not jewish, or if you are just Jew-ish and don't really clean: Maybe this will inspire you a little to think about food and what it actually means.

Book-illustration of the Wormser Machsor, (found on Wikipedia)