Kosher Bagel Rules

[tongodeon]

Today for breakfast matrushkaka, her dad, and I went to House of Bagels in the Richmond. While waiting for my whitefish and onion I overheard the store clerk explain that their bagels were kosher style, but not technicaly kosher. Being a fan of complicated religious rules I asked what the difference was

Comments

[xiphias]

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were kosher. There'd be no oversight, and, when you have no independent overseeing body, you get rampant fraud

[tongodeon]

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were kosher.

If you didn't have a certifying body, then anybody could claim their things were vegetarian/vegan. And without supervision it's possible for food that's not vegan to be claimed to be vegan, and I'm sure that actually does happen. And yet the hummus matrushkaka makes at home is still vegan, even if there isn't a vegan around to supervise its preparation, and even if meat is sometimes served at our house.

sealed, packaged foods are basically safe once they're sealed and packaged. The Lender's Bagels plant cannot operate on Saturday.

I'm trying to come up with a hack. Maybe you cook bagels every day except Saturday, and sell sealed/packaged day-olds on that day.

[xiphias]

Correct. The supervision doesn't make things kosher. The supervision allows people to claim with a degree of believability that their things are kosher

[tongodeon]

Correct. The supervision doesn't make things kosher. The supervision allows people to claim with a degree of believability that their things are kosher.

If I had a coop in my yard, and raised a couple chickens, and had my mother's friend Danny Sime teach me how to do kosher slaughter, and killed a chicken in the kosher manner, and drained the blood and salted the meat in the prescribed manner, then that chicken would be kosher, even if nobody else around certified it. And if I made that chicken into soup, that soup would be kosher.

This makes sense, but seems to contradict what I was told at the bagel shop. They seemed to imply that even if they did everything by the kosher rules, because there isn't a rabbi there to supervise/certify/bless the food that means it's not kosher.

[sploof]

I've forgotten most of what I used to know about kashrut law, but I think xiphias has basically got it right

[tongodeon]

if you're *ultra* strict, you might argue that a kitchen has to remain unused on Saturday to remain kosher, and therefore anything prepared in a kitchen on Saturday is not kosher

I got the feeling that the folks, running a bagel shop, occasionally ran into ultra-kosher people who took this line so they just said fine, we'll say our bagels aren't kosher.

[loic]

Right, rabbis aren't (as far as I understand it) magical or holy in any respect. What's important is the certifications that certain groups of rabbis grant that certain other groups of Jews care about.

[xtingu]

Rabbi simply means "teacher," or "guy/gal we all look up to as generally being more educated on these types on topics." So no, they're not magical or holy particularly.

At least in my limited Reform/Renewal frame of reference anyway.

[matrushkaka]

What's confusing me is the phrase "kosher-style but not kosher." I mean, I understand what they meant, but the phrase still confuses me. Last night I cooked miso-marinated black cod, Taiwanese noodles, and stir-fry vegetables. The dinner was Asian-style, but not Asian. I get that. But "kosher-style but not kosher" befuddles me for some reason.

[tongodeon]

If you didn't have a certifying Asian on the premises it would be possible to cook food in violation of Asian customs. In order to cook in the *spiritually* Asian style, it can't be contaminated with western-ness. So if you cooked an Asian food in Asia, sealed and packaged it, and then flew it to the United States it's technically Asian food, but the food that you cook in our kitchen is not.

[xiphias]

Correct.

Although I question the existence of "Asian style food" -- it's a freaking continent with pretty much every type of biome on the planet. I have trouble with the idea of "Chinese food" and "Indian food" -- both of those areas have vast varieties and styles of cuisines. So I can't imagine any term that would reasonably encompass all of both of those sets . . .

"European style food" is a more believable term than "Asian style food"

[xiphias]

In the United States, "kosher food" is associated not only with a set of ritual observances around food, but around a set of cuisines that are associated with the people whose ritual observances they are.

Knishes, kishke, kugel, bagels, and other "Jewish foods" can be made under adherence of the kosher laws, or not. But because they're associated with the culture of Ashkenazic Jewery, they can be considered "kosher style", even if the specific examples are not, themselves, actually kosher.

[haineux]

There is also a certain amount of braggadocio involved.

There are degrees of kosher. Many people are happy enough to get a hamburger without cheese at McDonalds, even though there might be a chance that some cheese touched the surface on which the burger rested.

On the other extreme, there are people that want to make sure that there's NO cross contamination, and there are restaurants that certify this by the simple trick of not serving dairy products at all. (They serve non-dairy creamer, often Mocha Mix, in place of the milk.)

When I was in college, I had occasion to go to a kosher deli operated by Alan Dershowitz. It was as strictly kosher and authentic as it could be, flying in the meat from NYC, importing all the tableware from a kosher restaurant, etc.

However, the rent on the place was astronomical, so he was "forced" to open on Saturday, and therefore his establishment was not, officially, kosher enough for some Jews. Plenty of Jews still ate there, though, because, as I was told, the pickles were really good.

[xiphias]

"Three Mavens" lasted about six months, if that, and it was losing money for that entire time

[crisper]

>because it is possible for goyim to purchase non-kosher bagels from the establishment, that renders all bagels sold at the establishment non-kosher

THIS PRODUCT MADE ON MACHINES WHICH ALSO PROCESS PEANUTS is important to peanut-allergy folks even when they are buying foods that do not inherently contain peanuts.

Or, for example, the separation of meat and dairy is upheld even when you know for absolute fact, through personal and direct involvement every step of the way, that there is no way that the milk in question could have come from the mother of the meat animal. Even though the Torah only says "do not boil a lamb in its mother's milk", the proscription has been widened substantially, for the same reason that engineers build bridges and skyscrapers to way higher tolerances than any actual load they will sustain.

cf "build a fence around the Torah" in your search engine of choice.