Kosher Bagel Rules
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
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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.
And my mother, for instance, would probably eat it, because she knows me and trusts me personally. Other of my friends would likely accept it, too. Because they know me personally.
And up until the 20th century or so, that's how things were done. You knew the person who was doing the slaughter, the person who was doing the baking, the people that were making your food in general. You didn't NEED certification, because you had personal contact with the people doing things, and you could make your own judgement on whether to trust them.
You still can, if you like. But, in general, people prefer to subcontract this out. A mashgiach is specially trained and certified to know all the kashrut rules, so he (almost always "he" -- sometimes "she", but it's rare) can go into a commercial kitchen and spot things that an average person who cares about kashrut would miss. And then, in order to get a certification from that mashgiach's organization, an institution agrees to open themselves up to surprise inspections, to make sure that they are still following the rules the mashgiach set up.
The maschgiach doesn't MAKE anything kosher. The maschgiach merely CERTIFIES that it is kosher.
In your example, if the vegans you knew insisted that the utensils used to prepare their food had never been used on meat, then you might have a problem. And that IS an issue in kashrut. If the vegans you knew weren't convinced that you were totally clear on what "an animal product" was, you might have a problem, especially if they defined it differently than you do. You might have issues with things like honey, for instance.
As far as your hack goes: some certifying bodies used to allow things like that. But it was just too complex and prone to simple failure -- not even fraud, just simple human error -- so none of the bodies I know of will allow it any more. There used to be a couple kosher places around Boston, though, that were open on Saturdays doing similar things, that had been grandfathered in.
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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.
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This stuff's complicated, and that is yet ANOTHER reason that restaurants fob it off to specialists instead of trying to figure it out themselves.
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