I’ve been wondering about this for a while. There have been all sorts of articles in the paper lately about how people get sick because the food industry is badly regulated. The meat plants, especially, ignore procedures for profit (yeah, I know, water is wet too, but it’s really blatant).
In order to be certified kosher, the food needs to be intensely supervised. Every little step of the way has to be set out and okay’d by the rabbi in charge. The ingredients have to come from approved sources. The rabbis will drop in on surprise visits and make sure there’s no monkey business. Any violation means the entire batch has to be recalled. Too many “mistakes” and they’ll stop certifying you. And this is in addition to any government oversight.
It’s not one hundred percent, but it seems logical that kosher food factories will have less shenanigans going on than their non-kosher counterparts. Any hard statistics to back this up??
I keep kosher. I’m not saying people who keep kosher are hypocrites. I’m saying that it looks like a lot of the bad stuff that goes on at non-kosher meat plants also goes on at kosher ones.
Meat is meat. Anything that involves processing meat on a large scale is going to have the same sorts of problems, whether that meat is bled out or not.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/dining/13kosh.html?scp=2&sq=kosher&st=cse”>The New York Times today</a> discusses this very question. Salting and rinsing, part of the koshering process, can reduce salmonella concentration on the skin of experimental chicken carcasses. However, in a sampling of chickens bought from stores, “conventional” chickens had the lowest overall bacterial load when compared with kosher and organic chickens. For non-meat food products, I can’t see how the kosher products would be much better. Maybe the inspecting rabbis notice unsanitary that would otherwise go ignored–but they’re rabbis, not food scientists.
Edit: Can anyone tell me what I did wrong with my link?
True, but on the other hand, the ingredients will definitely be what is on the label.
I personally prefer kosher hot dogs, they will definitely be beef, and if the rabbi is on his toes, lean muscle mass and not mystery bits. I also like Hebrew National’s flavor profile.
You tried to do HTML which the board doesn’t support. You have to put (url=“web address”)text(\url) (except use brackets instead of parenthesis) instead of the HTML code. Like so:
IANAJ or Jewish by any stretch but my impression of many jewish laws is that they are of a rather pragmatic and practical and fair business practices (from both a seller AND a buyer point of view) type in addition to the more metaphysical ones other religions seem to focus on.
So, if stuff if being certified kosher, I suspect they obey the spirit of the law in addition to the letter of the law when it comes to stuff like health, safety, and general honesty than just some random commercial operation.
Not that I think that random commercial stuff is dangerous enough to worry about for more than a few seconds, but that if I had to bet I would say kosher stuff might have a slight edge safety wise.
That is the ideal, yes. Unfortunately, every so often there’s some scandal where it turns out that the people were preparing the food in a kosher way, but were being less than kosher about their business practice. (That whole Agriprocessors shanda, for one). That, I’d say, probably happens in similar proportions to regular plants. What I was asking about was if the double supervision system catches more problems than the ones where the only regulator is Uncle Sam.
Kosher meat (as noted in the aforementioned NY Times article) is getting more popular with non-Jews, helped along by Hebrew National commercials like the one where they use the tag line “we answer to a higher authority” while showing a nervously sweating executive defending himself to an off-screen booming voice interrogating him about what he put in his company’s hot dogs and sausages (“Well, the government said it was OK!”).
On the other hand, I’ve seen contexts where both “Kosher” and “Halal” were used simply as terms for “all-beef” or “Middle Eastern” respectively, and where the vendors selling the products professed no idea that they had some kind of wider religious context. Two true stories: in Baltimore, I saw a stand advertising a special on “Kosher hot dogs with cheese”, and in my own hometown of NYC, a “Halal food cart” run by a black guy (In this context, I can’t bring myself to say “African-American” because actual Africans who come to America would know better) who was selling kebab meat skewers, offering chicken, beef and pork kebabs from the same griddle. (I wondered how long that would last, then decided to go and tell him it was a Bad Idea to sell Muslims and Jews food advertised as “Halal” that they might notice included pork.)
Yeah, I once heard about a New England fisherman advertising his “kosher” lobsters, because he simply thought kosher meant clean. (He changed the signs after he was clued in).
At least the lungs are OK, if the food is what they call "Glatt Kosher, which is a refinement of Kosher. People may have seen this indication too.
“Glatt” means “smooth” in Yiddish. For that, one of the tests is that the lungs of the animal have no lesions. (Sometimes stores will say Glatt Kosher for pickles or something, which makes no sense.)
BTW, lungs can now be sold in the US. YAY!:p:p (My father, who was among the poorest of the poor in the Old Country, ate lung all the time.)
I just wanted to address this. It’s a common conception, but it is incorrect. The U.S. is pretty much the world leader in food safety regulation and inspection. No other nation’s regulations are as strict overall; and we do a very good job at maintaining that level of safety for imported food.
In some cases, this is a drawback – it’s next to impossible to get unpasteurized cheeses or other things of that nature. But our meat packing plants are probably on average the cleanest in the world, especially given the sheer volume produced in the United States.
Of course, such scare stories are easy; you can point out to an E. Coli breakout or a salmonella scare. Such things are going to happen no matter what, of course, but we do a pretty good job here of making sure such things are few and far between.
:dubious: Nowhere near a zombie. The powers that be have declared zombies to take three months to ripen before they rampage and threaten the peasantry.
Just because the process is more intensely scrutinized doesn’t necessarily mean that it results in safer food. You need to keep in mind what the process is being scrutinized for: in the case of kosher, the oversight is to ensure that the food is being sourced and handled in a manner consistent with religious superstitions which have nothing to do with safety, except in some cases by happy coincidence. For example, to be certified as kosher, the food needs to be sourced from certain ritually “clean” animals, such as cattle, and not “contaminated” by contact, even indirectly, with “unclean” ones, such as pigs. (I am using the quotation marks here to make it clear that this particular kosher concept of cleanliness has nothing to do with actual sanitation or hygiene.) Also, the animals have to be killed in a certain manner, though again this is done in accordance with religious doctrine and not because non-kosher slaughter methods are any safer. Certain kosher foods need to be prepared by Jews only; unless you actually believe that Jews are inherently more hygienic than other people then this particular stricture isn’t going to have any effect on the safety of the food thereby produced.
That said, it’s entirely possible that the rabbis overseeing kosher food production may be keeping an eye out for actual hygiene, sanitation, and safety issues which happen to coincide with their religious laws, or even for ones which don’t but which are now regarded as common sense (like frequent hand washing). More people keeping an eye on safety is always a good thing, but whether those extra eyes belong to a rabbi or a government health and safety inspector makes no difference.