A view on Monsey
There is uproar in the religious Jewish neighbourhood of Monsey, New York. It appears that a kosher butcher has been repackaging non-kosher chickens and selling them as kosher. This is an enormous act of betrayal. This rips out the heart of the system of trust (or is that subservience) that those of us who keep kosher have with our kosher food suppliers and the authorities that regulate them.
I am nowhere near as observant as the frummers of Monsey, but I know I would be deeply shocked if this happened at my local butchers. This must be a nightmare for them. There the considerable hassle of re-koshering anything that might have come into contact with the unkosher meat, there is also the religious issue. Never is the adage "You are what you eat" more true than in Judaism. Kashrut is very often the first tool one uses to identify oneself as an observant Jew. The more religious you are, the more strictly you adhere to the laws of kashrut.
Some blogs have been going crazy on this, even the New York Times (registration required) has got in on the act. My own interest was piqued by a Jerusalem Post article that was sent to me by a reader. I was reminded of my favourite bugbears: the poor quality of kosher meat and the acceptance of this by kosher consumers.
What the people in Monsey are obsessing about is the provenance of their meat. Not in the same way that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall might obsess about provenance (and not in the way those chefs who put on their menus which grid-reference your steak came from, obsess) but nonetheless they are obsessing. They want to know that their animal has been killed in a certain way, that the shochet's knife was unblemished, that they are eating the right bit of the animal, that it has been stored correctly and that it has been labelled correctly. Fundamentally, they want to know about their animal in death.
That is fine - but what about how it lived? Some of the rules of kashrut do relate to animal husbandry, but they are sufficiently relaxed to enable kosher chickens to be intensively farmed. I cannot help but think that if we as consumers placed greater emphasis on holding our butchers accountable for how our meat lived, we would have much more comfort in how it died.
I am not saying that the people of Monsey brought this on themselves. I do believe that what has happened in Monsey, could happen in virtually any kosher community. But it is a warning to the rest of us to take more interest in the food we eat. The Jerusalem Post article indicates that rabbinic authorities think more regulation is required. I am not religiously knowledgeable enough to know if they are right, but I do know that wherever I encounter regulation it is usually a bad thing. I think consumers must accept more responsibility for the food they eat. Rather than relying on authorities to impose further rules - and then trusting them to enforce them.
This mess does destroy another belief that kosher cooks had always held dear: that kosher chicken tastes so much better than non-kosher chicken. After all, if that was the case, how come nobody noticed sooner?
