I’m not Jewish, but I have a close friend who is. She does keep kosher, though she doesn’t observe Shabbat as strictly as when she lived with her family. When my (now ex) fiance and I bought a condo and invited all our friends over for an open house, I decided to get most of the food from a kosher deli so that my friend wouldn’t have to “make do” as she does when we go out for dinner to a regular restaurant. We had a huge cold cut platter, served everything with disposable plates and cutlery, and for everyone else I had cheese from the supermarket on a separate plate. For dessert I made two cakes, chocolate and carrot, which contained no milk, butter or other dairy, and baked them in brand-new pans which I’d just bought anyway. I was vegetarian for a number of years and I know how I felt going to someone’s house who hadn’t given any thought to serving a single dish that I could eat; if I was going to have this friend at my house, I was going to make her feel as comfortable and welcome as anyone else.
The only person that I bothered to tell that I was my friend, since she was the only one to whom it made a difference. My ex, on the other hand, apparently thought kosher food was some kind of huge exotic deal and told everyone he had invited. The only person who had a problem with it was one of his co-workers - who is Jewish but does not keep kosher. Which I only found out when the guy left a ten-minute rant on our answering machine about how he didn’t want to eat that crap, nobody else would, and I was totally going overboard and was insulting him and everyone else to cater to this one friend. I was so upset I was ready to cancel the whole thing. It had only become a big deal because my ex, who was utterly ignorant of anything that wasn’t what he believed in (basically nothing) had turned it into one. Of course, as it turned out, everyone else loved the food - turkey, roast beef, beef salami, turkey pastrami, nothing unfamiliar. In fact, everybody else said it was the best they’d ever had, and they were disappointed that the deli was so far from where most of them lived.
While doing a bit of research on what else I could serve and what other restrictions I had to observe, I came across a great website, jewfaq.org. I ended up reading pretty much the whole site, not just the stuff about kashrut. I, too, found enormous respect for Judaism as a religion and a tradition. It does have information about conversion, and though the author mostly addresses topics from the point of view of her own tradition, she acknowledges others and explains how they may differ, or sometimes that she knows other traditions differ from hers but doesn’t know all the details. I did consider converting myself, since I was sort of nominally raised Christian but my family aren’t particularly religious, but eventually decided against it. Even though I’m aware among the different traditions more weight is applied to different commandments than others (as others have pointed out, for example, Reform Jews may or may not be kosher all or some of the time), my personal feeling was that if I was not prepared to honor every single one, I was not prepared to convert. You could consider this, I guess, to be sort of an extension of what hajario said about some considering a convert to be more holy; if I were born Jewish (I guess some Reform Jews would consider that I am; my father’s mother’s family were ethnically Jewish but had converted to Christianity a couple generations back. To most everyone else that’s the wrong side of my family.) I might feel that I could follow those commandments that felt most appropriate to me, but if I’m choosing it, I don’t feel free to only pick those bits I like and leave out the rest.
I’m glad that you feel more comfortable than I about that part of it, and I hope that after your meeting you are even more sure that you are making the right decision for you.