Kosher Nation:
Why More and More of America’s
Food Answers to a Higher Authority
By Sue Fishkoff
Schocken, 384 pages
When Tootsie Rolls became officially kosher last year, there was little of the fanfare that greeted the Orthodox Union’s 1997 certification of Oreos, when many kosher keepers, myself included, began hungrily indulging in this once-forbidden food. Perhaps the lackluster response to Tootsie Rolls is due to the fact that these candies were never quite so proverbially treyf as Oreos. But it’s also because the kosher community has become increasingly accustomed to partaking, at least culinarily, in the outside world.
The first kosher symbol appeared in 1923, on cans of Heinz Vegetarian Beans, and the years since have seen a rapid expansion in the production and certification of kosher food. This transformation, expertly chronicled in Sue Fishkoff’s Kosher Nation, has redefined what it means to keep kosher today.
Fishkoff, the author of The Rebbe’s Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch, surveys the history of kosher in America, from the heyday of backbiting local butchers to the present, with thousands of globetrotting professional supervisors ensuring the propriety of a vast range of foods. She travels across the United States and China, interviewing manufacturers, rabbis, ritual slaughterers, butchers, wine growers, and consumers.
Kosher Nation profiles a rabbi who spends two to three weeks every month supervising Chinese factories. We meet the Long Island butcher fined for alleged violations of New York’s kosher laws who keeps a 22-year-old lamb tongue, marked with a red tag reading “Seizure Notice,” in deep freeze; we are introduced to a Chasidic mother of eight who has made it her mission to educate Orthodox Jews about the presence of non-kosher bugs in produce. “I’m happy if I can help another Jew stop eating broccoli and cauliflower,” she tells Fishkoff.
The breadth of Fishkoff’s research is remarkable: no crumb, no bug, is too minute for discussion. At the same time, she broaches larger questions about religious identity and acculturation, about marketing, commercialization, and globalization. As Kosher Nation ably demonstrates, what and how we eat remains a highly effective means of telling the story of who we are.
_____________
Where keeping kosher used to mean checking ingredients on packaging, now an increasingly organized and stringent Orthodox community disavows that practice in favor of the explicit assurance of a mashgiach, an ecclestiastic official working for a large organization who certifies that the product is acceptable, as represented by a mark called a hechsher. Where one of the reasons often cited for keeping kosher is to create separations between Jews and non-Jews, the rise of the gourmet kosher restaurant, many of which aren’t outwardly recognizable as kosher, breaks down those very barriers.
Most striking is where the Jewish community once celebrated each newly certified product, now one third to one half of food in a typical American supermarket—from Coca Cola to chocolate Easter bunnies—is officially kosher. The population of kosher keepers, fewer than 1 million in the United States, hardly warrants such a proliferation. “The majority of those who consciously buy kosher food are buying it for other reasons, mainly having to do with health and food safety concerns,” Fishkoff writes, citing the needs, for example, of vegetarian or lactose-intolerant consumers for whom the kosher label provides assurances about the lack of meat or the lack of dairy in a product that a reading of ingredients does not.
But equally at play is the perception that kosher food is of better quality or greater purity—because it “answers to a higher authority,” as Hebrew National’s classic ads state (even if, ironically, Hebrew National’s standard of kashrut did not answer to a high enough authority to be acceptable in most of the Orthodox world). This higher standard is certainly a useful perception for the kosher world, regardless of whether it’s always true: whether a mashgiach is present to ensure that the meat product known as rennet, necessary for the making of many cheeses, does not get into a Cheez-It has little to do with an amorphous notion of purity and everything to do with adherence to a particular code of religious law.
If kosher has resoundingly entered the mainstream culture, so too has the mainstream culture entered the kosher world. “If Martians landed in New York today, they would think pizza and sushi were the most Jewish foods,” the food critic Arthur Schwartz tells Fishkoff. That sushi is common fare at even ultra-Orthodox weddings testifies to the continued interplay between religious and secular culture, even for those communities who profess to be shielded from it.
While Fishkoff attributes the rise of kosher gourmet to the growing presence of baalei teshuva (newly observant Jews), it is also due to a heightened sophistication of the Orthodox world itself, even for those raised within. In the case of food, this change mirrors the general rise of the foodie and the cultural shift from bland iceberg to funky arugula. Now that there is not only kosher sushi but even kosher hip-hop, there is the hope, on the part of some Orthodox leaders, that such innovations will help keep people within the fold: why go outside when we have everything you need right here? And yet this tactic of hechshering the modern world inevitably opens doors as well. The so-called forbidden fruit can still tempt, even if it bears a nearly indiscernible kosher insignia.
The complex interplay between tradition and modernity is rarely without such paradoxes, and in this book it plays out most strikingly in Fishkoff’s chapter about kosher wine. “Why does kosher wine suck?” Jeff Morgan, a former editor of Wine Spectator, was asked, prompting him to develop a $90 bottle of kosher wine that won rave reviews—and the fact that those accolades are from non-Jewish sources makes it all the more valuable. Most kosher wine is heated almost to boiling as a complicated means of circumventing a prohibition against non-Jews coming into contact with the wine. In a desire to create better wine, many high-end wines today are not boiled, but in order to be kosher, they require strict adherence to this ban on contact. The ironies are ample: you can make wine good enough to gain entry to the outside world, but how in step with the outside world can you be when its defining ingredient is that no non-Jew, or non-observant Jew, has touched it?
_____________
This question is debated more in the liberal Jewish world—in a Washington D.C. minyan, for example, that considered banning kosher wine because members found offensive “the ethnocentric overtones of this practice.” But the fact that the solution is to have two tables, with both kosher and non-kosher wine, is itself a sign of growing interest in kashrut across the Jewish spectrum. This is an evolution that Fishkoff explores, from the Reform movement’s notorious 1883 “Trefa Banquet”—a celebratory meal featuring shellfish and other forbidden foods whose scandalous menu actually played a crucial role in the creation of the Conservative movement within American Jewry—to the fact that many Jewish federations now serve kosher for all public meals.
Bugs, however, are another matter: even for many within Orthodoxy, eyes begin to roll at the fact that supervisors are required to check the now fashionable arugula with a jeweler’s loupe or that water, too, must be filtered because of the discovery of tiny crustaceans. These requirements, unheard of a generation ago, give rise to a larger question about the “chumrai-
zation,” or increased acceptance of stringencies, within this community, and raise the question as to whether this is diligent observance or extremism run amok.
If Fishkoff has her own answer to this question, she’s not telling. Employing a reportorial tone, she treads lightly, neither idealizing nor denigrating. While this tone allows the people she meets to gently square off against one another, it also has the effect of creating a narrative that often feels pareve. At least in the case of bugs, it would have been useful to hear more voices from across various religious communities about the implications of the increasing stringencies. And for all branches of Judaism that pay attention to ritual, the religious attention now paid to the most minute of bugs is a reminder of the larger difficulty of bridging the gap between details of ritual and larger values of religious life.
Fishkoff uses the same hands-off tone when describing the various scandals that have rocked the kosher world, particularly in recent years. The most highly publicized, the Agriprocessors meat scandal, eventually resulted in the imprisonment of its owner, Aaron Rubashkin, and the closure of the largest kosher meat factory in the United States. To the embarrassment of many, it raised the question of whether kosher meat could still claim to answer to any kind of higher authority.
One initiative that began as a result of this scandal was Hechsher Tzedek, started by the Conservative movement to reward producers that maintained certain ethical standards. Uri Tzedek, headed by Orthodox rabbinical student Shmuly Yanklowitz, launched the Tav HaYosher, or ethical seal, to mark restaurants with good working conditions and fair treatment of employees. Both seek to address the relationship between the ethical and the ritual, as well as to grapple with the spiritual value of food.
Just as the rise of kosher gourmet was a sign of the times, this change in the kosher conversation now fits squarely into the age of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a rich exploration of the new Jewish food movement, Fishkoff profiles a group of twentysomethings who gather to watch goats being slaughtered according to Jewish law and interviews those who want to reframe tradition to ask whether eggs from chickens held in overly cramped quarters ought to be considered kosher. The traditional arbiters of kosher, many of whom probably don’t know from Michael Pollan, might speak a different language from these Jewish food activists. Yet when it comes to a commitment to knowing the origins of what you eat and a belief in the idea that you are what you eat, they sound remarkably alike.
