I know there's a big ol' lobster lovefest going on in CuisineNet this month, and I'm sorry to have to rain on your creepy red insectoid parade. But this is my lot in life, as a party-pooping kosher-keeping Jew. Lobsters give me the heebie-jeebies.

It was not always thus. When I was a tiny tyke, we'd go to Grandma's glatt treif house on Cape Cod, and Dad, forced to suffer in enforced kashrut by my whip-cracking mother, the Queen of the Jews, always took this opportunity to rip into lobsters with gleeful abandon. Mom's rule was that Dad could eat whatever he wanted outside our upstanding Jewish home. As a result, he'd go into a crustacean and bivalve frenzy every time he left the house. (The Pavlovian drool trickle that followed him into Joe's Stone Crabs in Miami or Legal Seafood in Boston was not pretty.) At Grandma's, Dad enjoyed torturing Mom by feeding me little hunks of butter-dipped carcass. Too young to have a giant red sea-bug of my own, I would hold one antenna in my chubby little fist and suck on it with slurpy infant joy while my mother's heart broke in two.

When I got older and became somewhat sentient, I decided to keep kosher. (I also chose to be almost exclusively vegetarian. Said choice may have had something to do with another epiphany I had at Grandma's--I saw a big veiny taste-bud-studded object in her refrigerator and suddenly understood that "tongue" was tongue.) Since I live in a city of veggie havens like Millenium, Greens and Joubert's, keeping kosher isn't terribly constraining for me.

It can be a pain, though. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 rattle off the zillion rules for what Jews should and shouldn't eat: Animals that chew their cud and have a split hoof (sheep, goat, cow, ibex), fine. No kitties, no badgers, no pigs, no weasels, no puppies, no snakes. Of the flying creatures, no eagles, no vultures, no owls, no bats. (Presumably this means no birds of prey and no winged rodents.) Insects are out, except for grasshoppers, locusts, crickets and katydids, reasons unclear. Fish are fine as long as they have scales and fins. This eliminates all shellfish, eels and catfish. Why? Interpretations range from "health reasons" to "because making food choices every day serves to separate us, reminding us that we're special" to "because God said so, that's why!" In short, no one knows.

The good news: They don't suffer. The bad news: They ARE giant bugs.

But Torah be darned, there seems to be a mystical connection between Jews and shellfish. Even folks who keep kosher at home often follow the rule: "Anything consumed in a Chinese restaurant is kosher." Maybe its the lure of the forbidden; maybe shrimp and scallops and the like just taste really awesome. After all, everyone knows Jews are huge foodies. My friend Amy tells me her parents belong to a 99.9% Jewish country club on Long Island; on Friday nights (i.e. on the SABBATH) they have lobster dinners. Another friend gleefully reports that he spotted Rock Jew Adam Duritz of Counting Crows wolfing down shrimp backstage after a show. Me, when I was about eight, I stood trembling in the tool shed with a package of just-purchased, lard-laden Oreos. I stood in the tool shed so that if I were struck by lightning, the house would not burn down. I was considerate even in my sinning. The cookies of doom tasted sublime, much better than Hydrox, and I am alive today. Furthermore, they are now made with vegetable shortening, so they are kosher. I have no idea what this story means.

When keeping kosher becomes a battle of wills, it can turn ugly. My friend J., a self-professed "Hanukah-bush Jew" was once engaged to an Orthodox man who tried to control her dietary habits without doing any of the actual cooking. "My favorite thing in the world to do when he pissed me off was to slip some shellfish into his dinner," she says serenely. "That, and rubbing his milk and meat dishes together when he wasn't around." She is now married to an Anglican.

I don't want to force my fiance to give up his beloved sea larvae. I have my own ambivalences and I'm not comfortable imposing dietary martial law. I guess when we have kids, I'll have to decide one way or the other, "for the children's sake," a line I heard a lot growing up. Of course, if they want to eat lobsters, I'll have to put my head in the oven.