On February 25, exactly one month before the beginning of Passover 2013, the Orthodox Jewish world was sent into a combination of panic and outrage. The reason: The Orthodox Union, the century-old umbrella organization and major authority on what foods should be designated kosher—its “OU” certification can be found on everything from Oreos to Absolut—added the pseudograin quinoa to a list of foods that Jews should not eat during Passover.

For the eight days of Passover, Jewish dietary restrictions grow in number to exclude all leavened products—or chametz—to honor the experience of the ancient Jewish slaves who undertook the exodus from Egypt in such a hurry that they could not wait for the dough of their bread to rise. During Passover, any and all foods featuring chametz must not only be avoided, but removed from the home, which is scrubbed clean to guarantee that not even a crumb survives.

Quinoa is not chametz. Instead, the OU declared that it “may be” what is known as kitniyot—a Hebrew word meaning “legumes” that has become a Passover food category that includes non-legumes such as rice. As an extra precaution, during Passover, Ashkenazi Jews do not consume items considered kitniyot; although these items do not rise when combined with water, as chametz does, they are avoided because of a custom developed by rabbinic authorities in Europe during the Middle Ages to prevent confusion. As the OU is a trusted authority across the Orthodox spectrum, forbidding quinoa—a protein-rich and gluten-free relative of the beet plant—would have removed one of the most popular additions to the otherwise lackluster Passover diet. But more than that, it would have marked a highly symbolic turning point in the religious identity of the Orthodox Jewish world. David Barak, a former professional mashgiach (one who certifies a food business as kosher) who teaches classes in practical kashrut in Washington D.C., pulled no punches. Quinoa, he wrote on his website, “has become a flash point for the battle for the soul of Orthodox Judaism between those who think that the answer to modern questions lies in the reasoning of those who came before us, and those who want to make it up as they go along.” The OU, it seemed, had cast its lot with the latter.

Yet there was something of a happy ending to the story: Within a day, the OU removed quinoa from the kitniyot list. It was, Barak wrote in an update the following night, “the triumph of sanity.” A week later, Barak’s post on the OU’s quinoa listing had garnered more Web traffic than anything he had ever written. Those kosher keepers who had taken to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social-networking sites to register their outrage declared victory.¹

Most major Orthodox experts in Jewish law consider quinoa permissible (though it must be marked as kosher for Passover, like other packaged foods), and the supermarkets in the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Brooklyn, Monsey, Manhattan, and elsewhere have said they plan to carry it on Passover. This has been an ongoing battle that quinoa seems to have won. How it gained such approval, however, challenges popular notions about Orthodox Judaism, the intersection of faith and science, and centuries-old traditions.

What’s more, if Modern Orthodoxy survives as its own distinct stream of accepted Orthodox Judaism, it may have quinoa to thank.

In many ways, 2013 is an appropriate moment for this particular battle. The United Nations has declared it the International Year of Quinoa, calling attention to the grain’s nutritional value and the added income it brings to poor farmers where it is grown, primarily in Bolivia and Peru. According to the Mayo Clinic, there are nearly 2 million American adults with gluten allergies, a fourfold increase in the last 50 years. Combine all that with the famously bland and restrictive Passover diet and quinoa seems less like the unleavened bread the Israelites ate on their way out of Egypt and more like the manna from heaven that sustained them in the wilderness. But to understand why quinoa risked being outlawed on Passover, and why the process that led to its approval is so significant, it is necessary to understand the complex—and, to many Jews, endlessly frustrating—precedent it had to compete with: corn.

The flagship law of Passover is the prohibition against eating or owning chametz. The grains included in this law are wheat, oats, rye, barley, and spelt. These grains “rise” when raw and mixed with water; other grains “rot” when fermented, and therefore cannot be considered chametz. This is not subject to interpretation or rationalization; the commandment is in Exodus itself. “Seven days shall you eat unleavened bread,” the King James Bible translates the verse from Chapter 12. “Even the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eats leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.”

The broadening of the number of forbidden Passover foods from chametz to other products is the result of rabbinic interpretation among Ashkenazi Jews, who abstain from eating kitniyot foods on Passover for three reasons. First, cooked dishes made from chametz look similar to dishes made from some forms of kitniyot. Second, kitniyot foods can be ground into flour that looks like wheat flour. Third, kitniyot foods are often grown in fields adjacent to fields that grow prohibited grains. (It is permissible to own kitniyot on Passover.)

Because the laws of kitniyot were established by the rabbis before the introduction of certain foods, the power of tradition in Jewish practice comes into play to determine whether later products or innovations should be considered exceptions to the rule or should be grandfathered in to existing halakhic constraints. In his book Contemporary Orthodox Judaism’s Response to Modernity, Barry Freundel describes halakhic authority as resting on three concentric circles. The central circle, he writes, is revelatory law, such as the Five Books of Moses. The second circle is rabbinic interpretation. And the third is “community custom, or minhag.” Freundel notes that a community’s practice could often be its own source of authority if the community’s rabbinic leadership was unsure how to rule in a specific case. “Most intriguing in this regard is the requirement that a new rabbinic law does not take effect unless a majority of the people accept it,” writes Freundel. “Non-acceptance by a majority of the nation is ultimately a veto that cannot be overridden.” It’s useful to keep this principle in mind as an indication that lay members of the Jewish community do have some say in how their traditions develop. 

After the rules regarding kitniyot were established, two new crops were introduced: potatoes and maize (corn). Ashkenazim are permitted to eat potatoes on Passover but not corn. Neither is a legume, and both can be ground into flour. Indeed, pasta and pizza crust made from potato flour have become popular Passover substitutes. The reason for the exclusion of potatoes but not corn from the prohibition isn’t exactly clear, since what applies to one would seem to apply to the other. One prominent justification for it, however, is etymological. In a 2002 article for Kashrus magazine, Zushe Yosef Blech explains:

The word “corn” can be traced back to the ancient Indo-European word “grn,” which literally meant a small nugget. In German, this word became “korn” and in Latin, “grain” [sic “granus”], both of which include any edible grass seed. In practice, these terms refer to the predominant grain in a given country. In the Americas, it refers to maize, in Scotland to oats, and in Germany to wheat or rye. Indeed, old English translations of Pharaoh’s insomniac premonitions refer to “seven sheaves of corn,” which was really one of the five grains. Yiddish speakers are similarly prone to this confusion, since they often use the term “korn” to refer to grain. It seems, however, that the popularity of corn—and its resulting assumption of this sobriquet—was sufficient for the custom of kitniyos to extend to this new “grain.”

Some rabbinic authorities in the past tried to include potatoes in the restriction, but they were overruled. It was into this dichotomy that quinoa was thrust when it started to become popular in America in the 1990s. There was certainly no historical tradition for quinoa. Would it enter the Passover menu through the gates opened by the potato, or would it be forced to join corn on the sidelines? It should not have surprised anyone when Jewish halakhic authorities were divided on the question—with good reason. Quinoa looks like a grain, and shares many of the qualities that make kitniyot forbidden on Passover. But also, it is neither legume nor grain, and there are no semantic sources of confusion as there were with corn (aside, of course, from the initial confusion of how to pronounce it in English: KEEN-wah).

For this reason, the influential kashrut organization Star-K issued a ruling in 1997 permitting quinoa. But as Passover shoppers are all too aware, permitting a certain type of food is only the beginning of what can be a long, and in some cases unsuccessful, process of actually obtaining it for Passover. For example, quinoa can be grown near food that is impermissible on Passover, leading to concerns that it might be mixed in with such grains—or even simply transported in the same containers as prohibited grains. It started to look like quinoa would become only theoretically, and not practically, kosher for Passover. Doubts were cast, and quinoa began disappearing from Passover menus.

This reminded the Jewish community not of corn, but another lost kitniyot battle—this one from their lifetime: peanuts. The influential 20th-century authority Rav Moshe Feinstein argued in the mid-1960s that peanuts were not kitniyot and warned against adding new foods to the kitniyot list. Feinstein explained that minhagim (customs) do indeed carry the force of law, but only as far as those customs extend. The kitniyot custom was created without the inclusion of peanuts, and therefore should not be widened to add them. Yet peanut products are generally excluded from Passover shelves.

As the debate over quinoa raged on, many began to suspect that the predilection among the ultra-Orthodox to treat modern conveniences with skepticism and assume their very convenience rendered them of dubious halakhic legality came to have undue influence on the process.

Yet it was exactly this modernity that facilitated the breakthrough that quinoa fans were hoping for. In 2011, at the height of the quinoa controversy, the New York Times reported that “a definitive answer is not likely to be reached until a rabbi can be dispatched to a remote mountain region of Bolivia to inspect certain quinoa operations.”

All it took was a plane ticket. A mashgiach from Star-K made the trek to Bolivia and inspected the fields. He found three problems. First, thanks to the increased popularity of quinoa, it was being grown in fields next to fields that grow grains forbidden on Passover. Second, the mashgiach had reason to believe the sacks used to transfer quinoa might be used for impermissible grains as well. Third, it turned out quinoa was popular among birds. To prevent the birds from eating the quinoa while it dried, some farmers covered the plants with barley or oats.

Technology came to the rescue. The rabbinic authorities determined it was possible to track which quinoa came from farms that were free of these concerns. This, in turn, revealed yet another obstacle: Quinoa farms were mass-producing the product for export. The rabbinic authorities could certify which quinoa was permissible—but to eat it, you might have to buy a 1,000-pound supply of it.

The wonders of globalization and trade soon came into play. Demand for quinoa made packaging the product for consumption a no-brainer. Shoppers can now buy it in 12-ounce boxes in stores or online directly from companies such as Quinoa Corporation. (Online shoppers are advised to ask for the Passover run.) The initial allowance of eating quinoa came with one more caveat: Consumers were told they must check the quinoa for impermissible foods that might have been mixed in before they eat it. But in December, Star-K announced that for the first time, they were certifying some quinoa kosher for Passover this year with no further checking required.

Does that mean quinoa is in the clear? Not so fast, say ethical foodies. In a January piece for the Guardian, journalist Joanna Blythman attempted to blow the whistle on the dark side of the globalized quinoa market. Westerners’ voracious appetites, Blythman wrote, are driving the price of quinoa to such a height that locals in Bolivia and Peru can no longer afford it. She noted increasing rates of malnutrition in areas that grow quinoa and blamed Western consumers for pricing farmers out of their own healthier crop. “In fact,” Blythman judged, “the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there.”

Not only are there other explanations for increased malnutrition—among them, the food preference of locals who can now access processed foods—but Blythman seems simply to be wrong about the quinoa trade “driving poverty” in quinoa-growing communities. The increased price of quinoa is generating profits, not poverty, for the farmers. “During the 1980s, 100 pounds of quinoa couldn’t buy a T-shirt,” the president of a regional farming cooperative told journalist Matt Thompson, who visited the quinoa-farming region for a story in the current issue of Eating Well magazine. Thompson adds dryly: “That’s not a past that farmers are interested in going back to.” Quinoa farmers can now afford to buy tractors and other equipment to do work they used to do by hand. Farm-family incomes tripled in the past five years. And many of those who abandoned the rural fields for the cities are coming back. Thompson reports that, according to the farming cooperative: “70 percent of the region’s young people can now afford to finish high school. In the poorest region of the poorest country in South America, that’s a small miracle.”

Talk of miracles is the language of Passover. And many Jews might consider the progress on quinoa a minor miracle itself. After all, though the Orthodox community is often criticized for its insularity, it was Orthodox institutions that sent their own representatives to the high quinoa plains of Bolivia to find a way to make Passover just a bit easier on everyone’s palate—and help farmers in remote corners of South America find more customers for their product along the way.

That doesn’t mean the pro-quinoa gains aren’t reversible. But a community-wide outpouring like this almost certainly could have saved peanuts. And to hear those arguing for a dynamic, responsive Orthodox Judaism that sees embracing modernity as a way to validate and reaffirm the wisdom of the sages, it could save even more.

1OU officials told me that any change on the website without a corresponding change in policy—OU rabbinic experts are divided on the issue, so the company does not certify quinoa for consumption during Passover—was “probably inadvertent.”