That's An Awful Lot Of Lettuce For That Lettuce

The last time I wrote about some of what I considered to be the, how shall I put it?...more minute rules of kashrut, I got into some trouble with my snarky remarks.  So I hesitated to even link this article that was sent to me by a reader about the kosher vegetable business.

“What could possibly be non-kosher about vegetables?” you may ask.  Well, it has more to do with the minute creepy crawlies found in so many of them.  They’re as forbidden as pork.

Now the truth is that we eat microscopic organisms all of the time.  Moreover, it’s always advisable to clean your veggies before you accidentally consume the visible, easily eradicated ones.  But it has come as some surprise to Orthodox Jews over the past 15-20 years that even the tiniest, most minuscule insects should be a problem.  As reported by Jonah Lowenfeld on JewishJournal.com:

In the last 20 years, Orthodox rabbis in general, and those involved in kosher certification in particular, have been working hard to introduce — reintroduce, they say — practices of checking fresh vegetables for bugs in observance of the laws of kashrut.

Blanket bans have been issued on the most bug-friendly and hardest-to-check produce: raspberries, blackberries, whole artichokes and more are entirely forbidden because they’re too complex and fragile in form (the berries) or too tightly closed (artichokes) to inspect.

The other day I was asked by a kosher restaurateur with whom I’m friendly about an order for an observant family member.  He wanted to know if she would eat broccoli.  It’s another food that many Orthodox Jews are doing without altogether.

This newfound concern has turned into a profitable industry for growers who can convert vegetables into gold:

In late January, Glatt Mart, an RCC [Rabbinical Council of California]-certified supermarket on Pico Boulevard [in L.A.], was selling an ordinary head of romaine lettuce (1 pound, 6 ounces) for $1.19, while a much smaller head of romaine from Asyag’s [kosher] farm (10.3 ounces) was priced at $3.59, seven times as much per ounce. By comparison, a pre-washed — but not kosher-certified — 10-ounce bag of romaine lettuce packaged by Ready Pac sold for $2.99, just under six times the price per ounce of the ordinary head of lettuce.

That’s a lot of money for a mitzva that no one ever heard of before:

Although Orthodox officials today present the bug rules as rooted in the Bible and a centuries-old tradition of Jewish law, [David] Kraemer [a professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary] said the sanctioning of certain fruits and vegetables is actually a recent phenomenon. It is, Kraemer said, one more step in a long process in which Jews throughout history have adopted ever-stricter regulations on their eating, a process he calls “humratization,” derived from humra, the Hebrew word for a stricture that goes above and beyond what is required under halachah — Jewish law.

Orthodox rabbis dispute this characterization.

“This is not a humra,” [Rabbi Elazar] Muskin [of Young Israel of Century City, a large Modern Orthodox synagogue] said. “This is real halachah. You’re not allowed to eat these insects. If you’re a kosher-observant Jew, this means something to you. Just like you have to worry about other kosher laws, this is part of the kosher laws.”

Many years ago, Rabbi Marc Angel, one-time president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, visited my Hillel and addressed the issue.  He told us at the time that he does eat broccoli and all of the rest because his mother did and her mother before her and so forth.  It made good sense to me at the time.

Of course, you can pay top dollar for your kosher lettuce, but it comes with no guarantees:

Randy Fried, a co-owner of R House Foods, a catering company that began providing the food at the Modern Orthodox Shalhevet School at the beginning of the current school year, remembers exactly when the change happened. He was working at another RCC-certified catering company when the first package of RCC-certified romaine lettuce arrived.

“We open it up, we pull back the first leaf and there’s a slug sitting on the leaf,” Fried said. “And we all started laughing. This is what we’re paying two and half times [as much] for?”

So they called the RCC. “The answer we got is,” Fried said, “That’s not the bug we’re worried about.”

Getting rid of slugs is going to cost you extra.


(P.S. Extra points for the Broadway fan who can decipher the reference in the headline of this post!)