Super supervisors?

Despite the scandals and inconsistencies in kashrut, Timothy Lytton believes third-party certification should serve as a model for the world of industrial food.

By AMY SPIRO
roast chicken 521 (photo credit: MCT)
roast chicken 521
(photo credit: MCT)
In 1914, Bernard Baff, a kosher chicken retailer, was gunned down in a murder for hire in New York City that was funded by a group of 13 kosher poultry distributors against whom Baff had testified in a case of illegal price fixing three years earlier.
It is not hard to argue that Baff’s murder was a low point in a kashrut regulation industry marred by scandals, fraud, rivalries and extortion throughout the first half of the 20th century. But in Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food, author Timothy D. Lytton asserts that today may be a golden age of kashrut, and that the industry of third-party certification may serve as a model for other regulatory systems in the world of industrial food.
The book traces the history of kashrut certification, from its beginning in Talmudic times to its building toward the $12 billion industry it is today.
In medieval times, certification was handled by a shohet, or ritual slaughterer, serving a single community. Slaughterers who were found to be selling treif (nonkosher) meat were generally expelled from the community and the industry, a fairly effective deterrent against fraud.
The biggest problems, Lytton recounts, arose when the Jewish community in the United States began to grow. Those who moved to America, the land of opportunity, were eventually confronted with the chance to set up independently as slaughterers, butchers and supervisors, without any oversight or deterrence against fraud.
Compounding the problem was that supervisors or slaughterers were almost exclusively employees of the meat companies, providing a financial incentive for them to declare meat and poultry kosher when it was not, and promoting rivalries among those in the business.
Lytton, who wrote the book while on sabbatical in Yeroham from his job as a professor at Albany Law School, details how throughout the 19th century in New York – where most of the country’s Jewish population was at the time – various methods of policing the reliability of kosher meat failed, including governmental regulation. By 1925, the New York City Department of Markets estimated that 40 percent of the meat sold as kosher was not so – and that was likely a conservative estimation, Lytton writes.
What initiated the turnaround, he argues, was the rise of industrial kashrut, and the “big five” kosher certification companies – the OU, Kof-K, OK, Star-K and CRC. As mass-produced packaged foods surged onto the market, so did the demand to certify them as kosher. The cost of certifying factory-produced foods was much lower than that of meat and poultry, and the increased sales more than made up for the added expense.
Lytton explores the many ways that the agencies have remained trustworthy and immune to extensive fraud, including their reliance on each other for ingredient certification, their mutual desire to have kashrut maintain a good reputation in the food industry, and their efforts to insulate their kashrut standards from financial considerations.
“The rise of industrial kashrut has transformed the business and organizational model of kosher certification in ways that have eliminated the widespread dishonesty and corruption that were rampant a century ago,” Lytton writes. Though he argues for its effectiveness, Lytton doesn’t romanticize the state of kashrut today. He delves deep into the histories of the big five, their internal troubles and the arguments among them that persist until today.
The OU, which certifies the largest market share of kosher products, has a nearmonopoly on certification of poultry and meat in the US, to the chagrin of many of the competing agencies.
Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, director of the OK, tells Lytton that “there is a mafia that controls the kashrut in the meat in America, and they don’t let any other organizations get in.... You have to pay an extortion racket in order to get your meat into places.... You can quote me on this, you could put me in all the newspapers on this, I am not ashamed to say it.”
The OU has also come under fire for providing certifications to non-food items like laundry detergent and foil, or foods not requiring certification like whole, fresh fruit.
Rabbi Alexander Rosenberg, who directed the OU kosher division from 1950 until his death in 1972, once defended the practice, saying that the fees from these certifications allowed the company to provide certifications for more costly items like poultry and matza, which require more oversight and employees.
“When we get money from Procter & Gamble or Palmolive on all the soaps and things, it costs us very little to have any sort of certification there. The money that we get from there, we’re able to see to it that there should be kosher chickens in America,” Rabbi Berel Wein, who succeeded Rosenberg at the OU, recalls him saying.
Wein also recalls Rosenberg employing superfluous supervisors to provide jobs for Holocaust survivors.
“We had three guys watching them make Tide soap,” Wein tells Lytton. “Now there is nothing non-kosher in Tide soap...
Nobody eats Tide soap... But all of them were Holocaust survivors. And [Rosenberg] convinced Procter & Gamble that Tide soap requires stringent supervision.”
More recently the OU has said that it provides certification to companies that “believe that kosher certification offers them a competitive advantage,” even if the organization itself believes it does not require hashgaha (supervision).
And while there are many other agencies that join the big five in their umbrella organization AKO (the Association of Kashrus Organizations), there are those that are snubbed, like the Triangle-K, led by Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag.
Despite being from a line of respected New York haredi rabbis and counting among his clients such national brands as Hostess, Fritos, Wonder Bread and – most prominently – Hebrew National, Ralbag’s certification is widely seen as unreliable among Orthodox Jews.
Kashrut insiders have claimed that the organization’s rulings may fall in line with Halacha, but are below the industry standard, and that it has lax administrative oversight, while others say the big five perpetuate these stories to help them poach clients.
“I don’t deal with them. They don’t deal with me,” Ralbag says.
Rabbi Zushe Blech, senior kashrut administrator at the Earth Kosher agency, tells the author that “there is still a lot of rivalry, [but] everybody talks to each other, everybody communicates on an ongoing basis; everybody is concerned with what the other organizations are doing because you can’t operate without relying on everybody else.”
Lytton ends by calling for the third party independent certification model to be applied to other food-regulatory work, like food safety, nutritional information, ecolabeling and organic claims.
With its twists and turns, scandals and triumphs, he has created a book that, while at times academic and pedantic in nature, is nevertheless an entertaining and intriguing look at the evolution of kashrut certification. Anyone with an interest in the kashrut industry, Jewish history in America, and the squabbles and rumors that still occur in kashrut will find this book a scintillating read.