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A review by lpm100
Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food by Roger Horowitz
5.0
Book Review
5/5 stars
"A well crafted narrative arc around a technical / complex topic."
This is a brilliant/fascinating book, and it is the second one of these types that I have read--the first being Timothy Lytton's book. ("Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food")
This book does have some recapitulation of the information contained in the aforementioned book, but there is other value-added information that is unique to this book:
1. This book seems to cover almost entirely only the 20th century.
2. The discussion on the process to come up with a hechsher features a slightly different cast of characters.
3. There is more use of narrative arc (stories/interesting controversies), which is then used to reverse engineer the politics/circumstances around the choice of one arbitrary decision versus another. (Jello was a chapter about gelatin, but also about the split between the Conservative and Orthodox movements AND about the actual Chemistry that goes into making gelatin.)
Thoughts:
1. It is well known that the process behind certifying a product as kosher (or not) is 99.999% political, but after reading this book I come up with the impression that it is also quite arbitrary: It may have worked out THIS particular way in THIS case, but with a very slightly different confluence of events it could well have worked out otherwise.
Horowitz gave us the sturgeon controversy: Jews who lived in some areas of Europe had been eating it in a matter of fact way for some number of centuries, and no one ever thought about "clarifying" the definition of scales in such a way that sturgeon became treif. (For the record, the conclusion that was arrived at is that: scales that can be taken off by hand without tearing the fish are kosher scales.)
And, overnight sturgeon went from being kosher to being treif.
There were a variety of opinions even with respect to its status and the fact that some were accepted and others rejected seems..... stochastic.
2. A lot of rabbis who make rulings about what is or is not kosher are really not too well trained in food science (or anything else practical) TO SAY THE LEAST.
Example #1: Of these many molecules that make up living things, they can be sliced and diced in ways that make it such that they have no resemblance to their source of origin--and that *was* the halaka all the way until the 1950s (ponim chadashot- this was the position of the Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodinski) but for some arbitrary/ political reason, his position was rejected.
Jello was kosher/ muttar/ halachic.
Until it wasn't.
-It used to be that insulin was taken directly from pigs for human use until recombinant DNA made it such that people could just splice insulin producing genes into bacteria.
No one of intelligence would suggest that a patient who consumed insulin that was made directly by a pig (let alone by bacteria with pig spliced DNA) was really eating pork.
But, for some reason.....recombinant DNA insulin is fine to eat but cheese produced by recombinant bacteria is not okay.
Example #2: There's not one single sentence in this book about the Cholov Yisroel Scam. (That's the idea that, all of a sudden, R'Moshe Feinstein did not rule what he did - - which is that dairy products in the United States are only cow milk by law, and therefore milk products there can be trusted.)
Somebody somewhere (who has likely never filled out a job application) ruled that there is the abstract possibility that somebody could mix pig milk in with cow milk (because producers are not afraid of government inspectors because they don't show up enough), and therefore it would not be kosher.
I don't think any person who has ever worked on a farm has ever considered milking a pig--or, if they did try then they learn why..... "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
And then, there is that *small issue* of quality control by the manufacturer in order to protect his brand. (Manufacturers go through a lot of trouble to make sure that every single package of their product is absolutely identical anywhere in the world. And if it is different one place in the world to another, it is deliberately so.)
But, why let a bit of multi-billion dollar industrial practice/practical knowledge get in the way of rabbinic quibbling?
3. Policy ultimately rises and falls on rabbinic bickering: Horowitz gives us the cautionary tale of Abraham Goldstein.
He was one of the pioneers in negotiating with companies to put kosher products out, but somehow he offended the wrong person and has disappeared from history.
4. The Orthodox position that they are the guardians of halaka whose function is to keep it from changing even one. single. iota. (and that non-Orthodox are filthy, heretical innovators) is to stand reality on its head.
It's not hard to find *any number* of examples where the longest chain of tradition was held by Masorti Judaism. (For instance: Hilchot Geirut were perfectly consistent from about the time of the destruction of the Second Temple all the way up until the time of Moshe Feinstein. Alas, those days are long over and it changes every year or two now since then.)
5. It *really is* extremists who are trendsetters, and they can be such not with any radical proselytization... but only by holding their own ground.
To wit: Some small business wants to get that last 10% of Jewish consumers, so they just make everything kosher.
Another business wants to get that last bit of an already small market of kosher consumers-- and therefore they just change their entire operation over to glatt kosher.
(I can foresee a day where Cholov Yisroel will become the standard--much in the same way that regular kosher was the standard, and then it was suddenly not good enough when glatt kosher came onto the scene.)
6. It seems like the process of manufacturing stringencies is never ending. Once people have worked out the logistics of getting this or that kosher product to market, then all of a sudden a new stringency comes out of nowhere and then it's not good enough anymore--even though it was just a fortnight ago. (p. 234--It was good enough to slaughter cattle in an inverted position until the Israeli Chief Rabbinate disagreed. You read that right: Take a cow, and rotate it 180° and suddenly it becomes non kosher.)
7. Church and state in bed with each other is never a good idea, and it's hard to believe that New York City actually chose one side over the other in an internal debate within Judaism (p.206). All the way up until 1992, no less.
Heaven help Medinat Israel, with its inextricable links between the rabbinate and the government.
It is interesting that the kosher certification industry in the United States is all private, and it seems to function in a pretty matter of fact way.
But, there is nothing but acrimony in the State of Israel where kosher certification is a state function.
Questions:
1. We all know about the superior Ashkenazi Jewish brainpower/organizational ability.
It is interesting to speculate the mechanism of action of this genetic endowment: every Mark Zuckerberg started out several generations back as the children of Orthodox Jews / rabbinic scholars.
And yet: religious observance and practical skills seem to be inversely proportional. (I can't tell you how many 22-year-old Haredim that I have met that have no driver's license and don't even know how to operate a washing machine. Or how many men with four kids who have never held any type of real job. Or even organized/submitted a CV, for that matter.)
How / why is one the genesis of the other?
2. Men of Words in a given society are a double-edged sword: people who were primarily talkers managed to hold the Jewish people together in between the destruction of the Second Temple and the rebuilding of the State of Israel. (But, for some reason they had no part in the actual physical building of the State.)
And they look just as likely to be instrumental in causing a rift that tears the country apart. (For the third time.)
Men of Words had to be the tool that convinced food manufacturers to pay for their opinions. But, the same professional talkers took hundreds of years to get kashrut standards right in North America. And they have also been unable to reach any lasting conclusions about marriage or conversion in the State of Israel proper.
3. It really is amazing how anything can be repurposed into a Social Justice Tool: Reform and Conservative Jews argue with Orthodox about the humane standards of kosher slaughtering as part of certification the foods that they don't even care about, because none of them keep kosher.
Is it really what I imagine.... That potential objects for social justice battles are bound only by the imagination?
Of the book:
267 pages of prose over 11 chapters. (More properly, 9 chapters + 1 prologue and 1 epilogue.)
Average of 24 pages per chapter.
369 individual citations. 41 per business chapter. 1.4 per page.
Chapter synopses:
1. A case study of a family argument about whether or not sturgeon is okay to break a Yom Kippur fast leads to a brief synopsis of the foundational sources of kashrut and also shows the extreme stochastic/ fluctuant nature of what is ultimately kosher. Or not.
2. When Coke came out, One Rabbi In Particular had to figure out how to approach companies and get lists of confidential ingredients in order to communicate to the Jewish Community whether or not something was kosher. And it was a two-way street, because Coca-Cola was the first company to make substitutions in order to maintain kosher customers. (Who knew that glycerin could be such a sticking point?)
3. Jello was Kosher for several decades.
Until it wasn't.
There is a lot of very subtle reasoning employed in determining the chemical transformation of a a substance from one form to another really is a chemical transformation to a totally different substance.
The position on Jello is actually a sharp dividing line between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism.
Believe it or not.
4. Discussion of the process and politics by which OU became the leading kosher label.
5. Discussion of industrial kashrut, with several specific case examples.
6. Manischewitz wine has been with us since Prohibition, but actually the largest number of their sales are to black people. An excellent way for Kedem to smear its competitor, Manischewitz, was to just point out that "you don't want this wine, because it's drunk by black people." (p. 152)
(This book is the first time I have ever heard a person outside of the South / white person actually use the word "scuppernong.")
7. Discussion of the rise and fall of kosher slaughterhouse industry. Horowitz observes that putting kosher meat right next to non kosher meat - - with according price differentials - - was enough to sway Jews toward buying the non kosher version of the same thing. (p. 189 "I'll be a fool no more").
Neat vocabulary terms: Sirchas. Beit Yosef. Begissing meat.
Sephardim's differing version of "What is glatt kosher?"
Cryovac saves the day.
The labor intensiveness of glatt kosher: Only 30% of animals will pass the glatt test, and then only the front half of those animals can be used. Meaning that kosher consumers have to pay for the sorting away of 85% of meat.
8. Attempts of outside people to make sure that animals were slaughtered in a humane way. Also, some details of the awesomely corrupt Agri-processors business of Shlomo Rubashkin.
Conclusion. (This could have properly been another chapter.) Discussion of certifying agencies reevaluation of their certifications in light of "humane slaughter" requirements. (What they concluded is that for purposes of cost-effectiveness, they need to limit their area of concern to no more than is absolutely necessary. Social justice organizations, the Orthodox certification agencies are not.)
Verdict: Strongly recommended and worth every penny.
The book can be read one chapter per sitting until it is finished.
And, it is probably worth it to reread the book several years later to try to glean those last bits of information.
5/5 stars
"A well crafted narrative arc around a technical / complex topic."
This is a brilliant/fascinating book, and it is the second one of these types that I have read--the first being Timothy Lytton's book. ("Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food")
This book does have some recapitulation of the information contained in the aforementioned book, but there is other value-added information that is unique to this book:
1. This book seems to cover almost entirely only the 20th century.
2. The discussion on the process to come up with a hechsher features a slightly different cast of characters.
3. There is more use of narrative arc (stories/interesting controversies), which is then used to reverse engineer the politics/circumstances around the choice of one arbitrary decision versus another. (Jello was a chapter about gelatin, but also about the split between the Conservative and Orthodox movements AND about the actual Chemistry that goes into making gelatin.)
Thoughts:
1. It is well known that the process behind certifying a product as kosher (or not) is 99.999% political, but after reading this book I come up with the impression that it is also quite arbitrary: It may have worked out THIS particular way in THIS case, but with a very slightly different confluence of events it could well have worked out otherwise.
Horowitz gave us the sturgeon controversy: Jews who lived in some areas of Europe had been eating it in a matter of fact way for some number of centuries, and no one ever thought about "clarifying" the definition of scales in such a way that sturgeon became treif. (For the record, the conclusion that was arrived at is that: scales that can be taken off by hand without tearing the fish are kosher scales.)
And, overnight sturgeon went from being kosher to being treif.
There were a variety of opinions even with respect to its status and the fact that some were accepted and others rejected seems..... stochastic.
2. A lot of rabbis who make rulings about what is or is not kosher are really not too well trained in food science (or anything else practical) TO SAY THE LEAST.
Example #1: Of these many molecules that make up living things, they can be sliced and diced in ways that make it such that they have no resemblance to their source of origin--and that *was* the halaka all the way until the 1950s (ponim chadashot- this was the position of the Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodinski) but for some arbitrary/ political reason, his position was rejected.
Jello was kosher/ muttar/ halachic.
Until it wasn't.
-It used to be that insulin was taken directly from pigs for human use until recombinant DNA made it such that people could just splice insulin producing genes into bacteria.
No one of intelligence would suggest that a patient who consumed insulin that was made directly by a pig (let alone by bacteria with pig spliced DNA) was really eating pork.
But, for some reason.....recombinant DNA insulin is fine to eat but cheese produced by recombinant bacteria is not okay.
Example #2: There's not one single sentence in this book about the Cholov Yisroel Scam. (That's the idea that, all of a sudden, R'Moshe Feinstein did not rule what he did - - which is that dairy products in the United States are only cow milk by law, and therefore milk products there can be trusted.)
Somebody somewhere (who has likely never filled out a job application) ruled that there is the abstract possibility that somebody could mix pig milk in with cow milk (because producers are not afraid of government inspectors because they don't show up enough), and therefore it would not be kosher.
I don't think any person who has ever worked on a farm has ever considered milking a pig--or, if they did try then they learn why..... "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
And then, there is that *small issue* of quality control by the manufacturer in order to protect his brand. (Manufacturers go through a lot of trouble to make sure that every single package of their product is absolutely identical anywhere in the world. And if it is different one place in the world to another, it is deliberately so.)
But, why let a bit of multi-billion dollar industrial practice/practical knowledge get in the way of rabbinic quibbling?
3. Policy ultimately rises and falls on rabbinic bickering: Horowitz gives us the cautionary tale of Abraham Goldstein.
He was one of the pioneers in negotiating with companies to put kosher products out, but somehow he offended the wrong person and has disappeared from history.
4. The Orthodox position that they are the guardians of halaka whose function is to keep it from changing even one. single. iota. (and that non-Orthodox are filthy, heretical innovators) is to stand reality on its head.
It's not hard to find *any number* of examples where the longest chain of tradition was held by Masorti Judaism. (For instance: Hilchot Geirut were perfectly consistent from about the time of the destruction of the Second Temple all the way up until the time of Moshe Feinstein. Alas, those days are long over and it changes every year or two now since then.)
5. It *really is* extremists who are trendsetters, and they can be such not with any radical proselytization... but only by holding their own ground.
To wit: Some small business wants to get that last 10% of Jewish consumers, so they just make everything kosher.
Another business wants to get that last bit of an already small market of kosher consumers-- and therefore they just change their entire operation over to glatt kosher.
(I can foresee a day where Cholov Yisroel will become the standard--much in the same way that regular kosher was the standard, and then it was suddenly not good enough when glatt kosher came onto the scene.)
6. It seems like the process of manufacturing stringencies is never ending. Once people have worked out the logistics of getting this or that kosher product to market, then all of a sudden a new stringency comes out of nowhere and then it's not good enough anymore--even though it was just a fortnight ago. (p. 234--It was good enough to slaughter cattle in an inverted position until the Israeli Chief Rabbinate disagreed. You read that right: Take a cow, and rotate it 180° and suddenly it becomes non kosher.)
7. Church and state in bed with each other is never a good idea, and it's hard to believe that New York City actually chose one side over the other in an internal debate within Judaism (p.206). All the way up until 1992, no less.
Heaven help Medinat Israel, with its inextricable links between the rabbinate and the government.
It is interesting that the kosher certification industry in the United States is all private, and it seems to function in a pretty matter of fact way.
But, there is nothing but acrimony in the State of Israel where kosher certification is a state function.
Questions:
1. We all know about the superior Ashkenazi Jewish brainpower/organizational ability.
It is interesting to speculate the mechanism of action of this genetic endowment: every Mark Zuckerberg started out several generations back as the children of Orthodox Jews / rabbinic scholars.
And yet: religious observance and practical skills seem to be inversely proportional. (I can't tell you how many 22-year-old Haredim that I have met that have no driver's license and don't even know how to operate a washing machine. Or how many men with four kids who have never held any type of real job. Or even organized/submitted a CV, for that matter.)
How / why is one the genesis of the other?
2. Men of Words in a given society are a double-edged sword: people who were primarily talkers managed to hold the Jewish people together in between the destruction of the Second Temple and the rebuilding of the State of Israel. (But, for some reason they had no part in the actual physical building of the State.)
And they look just as likely to be instrumental in causing a rift that tears the country apart. (For the third time.)
Men of Words had to be the tool that convinced food manufacturers to pay for their opinions. But, the same professional talkers took hundreds of years to get kashrut standards right in North America. And they have also been unable to reach any lasting conclusions about marriage or conversion in the State of Israel proper.
3. It really is amazing how anything can be repurposed into a Social Justice Tool: Reform and Conservative Jews argue with Orthodox about the humane standards of kosher slaughtering as part of certification the foods that they don't even care about, because none of them keep kosher.
Is it really what I imagine.... That potential objects for social justice battles are bound only by the imagination?
Of the book:
267 pages of prose over 11 chapters. (More properly, 9 chapters + 1 prologue and 1 epilogue.)
Average of 24 pages per chapter.
369 individual citations. 41 per business chapter. 1.4 per page.
Chapter synopses:
1. A case study of a family argument about whether or not sturgeon is okay to break a Yom Kippur fast leads to a brief synopsis of the foundational sources of kashrut and also shows the extreme stochastic/ fluctuant nature of what is ultimately kosher. Or not.
2. When Coke came out, One Rabbi In Particular had to figure out how to approach companies and get lists of confidential ingredients in order to communicate to the Jewish Community whether or not something was kosher. And it was a two-way street, because Coca-Cola was the first company to make substitutions in order to maintain kosher customers. (Who knew that glycerin could be such a sticking point?)
3. Jello was Kosher for several decades.
Until it wasn't.
There is a lot of very subtle reasoning employed in determining the chemical transformation of a a substance from one form to another really is a chemical transformation to a totally different substance.
The position on Jello is actually a sharp dividing line between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism.
Believe it or not.
4. Discussion of the process and politics by which OU became the leading kosher label.
5. Discussion of industrial kashrut, with several specific case examples.
6. Manischewitz wine has been with us since Prohibition, but actually the largest number of their sales are to black people. An excellent way for Kedem to smear its competitor, Manischewitz, was to just point out that "you don't want this wine, because it's drunk by black people." (p. 152)
(This book is the first time I have ever heard a person outside of the South / white person actually use the word "scuppernong.")
7. Discussion of the rise and fall of kosher slaughterhouse industry. Horowitz observes that putting kosher meat right next to non kosher meat - - with according price differentials - - was enough to sway Jews toward buying the non kosher version of the same thing. (p. 189 "I'll be a fool no more").
Neat vocabulary terms: Sirchas. Beit Yosef. Begissing meat.
Sephardim's differing version of "What is glatt kosher?"
Cryovac saves the day.
The labor intensiveness of glatt kosher: Only 30% of animals will pass the glatt test, and then only the front half of those animals can be used. Meaning that kosher consumers have to pay for the sorting away of 85% of meat.
8. Attempts of outside people to make sure that animals were slaughtered in a humane way. Also, some details of the awesomely corrupt Agri-processors business of Shlomo Rubashkin.
Conclusion. (This could have properly been another chapter.) Discussion of certifying agencies reevaluation of their certifications in light of "humane slaughter" requirements. (What they concluded is that for purposes of cost-effectiveness, they need to limit their area of concern to no more than is absolutely necessary. Social justice organizations, the Orthodox certification agencies are not.)
Verdict: Strongly recommended and worth every penny.
The book can be read one chapter per sitting until it is finished.
And, it is probably worth it to reread the book several years later to try to glean those last bits of information.