(RNS) — In November, three of America’s largest kosher certifying organizations came together to release new guidance regarding the status of beer, which has long been considered kosher by default. Due to the proliferation of flavorings brought on by craft brewing and other industry changes, however, the rabbis who declare food products to be in line with Jewish dietary laws now say to check the label before drinking.
“We’ve discovered that companies use many flavors, different flavors, to enhance even the simple beers that they manufacture. Those flavors need to be kosherly supervised,” said Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the head of kosher operations at the Orthodox Union, who released the guidance along with Star-K and OK Kosher. “We’ve seen more than one situation … that some beers have dairy in them. They add lactose, they add milk, so a beer could be dairy, which has very serious kosher ramifications.”
So-called hazy IPAs, for instance, which have recently seen a massive jump in popularity among beer drinkers, sometimes contain lactose, a milk sugar, which adds a subtle creaminess and opacity. It also makes the resulting beer a no-no on any table where meat is being served, according to kosher laws.
The certifiers noted that more than 1,000 beers already bear certification from the major certifiers, but the new guidance is still a stark turn for those — the large majority of them Orthodox Jews — who keep kosher in the United States, and who have counted on beer as a safe go-to at social events and business lunches. Many are shocked by the decision. In an interview with the Forward, one Jewish beer aficionado noted that for kosher-keeping travelers, breweries were often a safer alternative to wineries, as wine has traditionally had far more complex kosher rules.
Posts and comments across social media have accused the certifiers of everything from a cash grab — the more rules, the more companies pay the organizations to review their products — to imposing arcane personal stringencies on the wider Jewish public.
Rabbi Moshe Elefant. (Photo courtesy of Orthodox Union)
Elefant stressed that the changes were the result of long deliberations. “It’s a fine line and a tight rope that we walk on, because we want to do what’s right, but we recognize that the consumer has very, very serious expectations about the amount and type of kosher food available,” he told Religion News Service. “Beer was traditionally one of those products that was always considered kosher no matter what, because what is beer? Yeast, hops, barley, water, all inherently kosher ingredients.”
But as with any processed food, Elefant said, production has become more complicated, “whether it’s the ingredients that are used, whether it’s the equipment on which those ingredients are used.” Making the kosher call, he added, is “not as black-and-white as it used to be.”
In truth, little about the kosher label is as black-and-white as it once was.
Kashrut — the noun form of the adjective “kosher” — comprises the dietary laws laid out in the Torah, later elucidated in the Talmud and rabbinic works such as the 14th-century compendium of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch. It stipulates which animals can and cannot be eaten — most famously banning pork or shellfish, but less famously camels, rabbits and others. The laws also prescribe a method of slaughter. Meat and milk are to be strictly kept separate, and products containing grapes have their own complications.
Perhaps most complicated is keeping separate cooking equipment and eating utensils that touch milk or meat, or nonkosher foods.
Today, over 1.3 million products produced in some 15,000 factories across 105 countries bear the OU symbol, according to the group’s website. Another 300 certifying agencies operate in the U.S., though it’s estimated that 80% of the kosher market’s goods are certified by the top five organizations.
That wasn’t always the case. For most of Jewish history, keeping a kosher home was the domain of the Jewish homemaker. Vegetables were grown close to home. Meat, dairy and baked goods were all the products of community suppliers who relied on community trust. Urbanization, globalization and the industrialization of the food and beverage industry have changed the way humanity eats and, with it, what keeping kosher looks like.
The OU got into kosher certification in the 1920s, after New York Jews’ experiment with appointing a chief rabbi, who would be responsible for kosher certification. The term of Rabbi Jacob Josephs, the city’s first and only chief rabbi, saw mass riots against kosher butchers.
A bartender fills a glass of beer. (Photo by Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels/Creative Commons)
“Rabbis competed for commissions and so there was a lot of infighting among rabbis,” said Rabbi Zev Eleff, the president of Gratz College and a scholar of American Jewish history. “This was truly why Rabbi Jacob Joseph was not a successful so-called chief rabbi in New York. It is my belief that it was the other rabbis who did him in, since one of his platforms was to standardize kashrut.”
OU’s Elefant said his organization “was created out of that catastrophe, with the idea that kosher should no longer be the job of a single rabbi, the job of a single individual. It should be a communal thing where no one has any personal interest, besides to do what’s right.”
By the late ’40s, the idea of certification was increasingly adopted as factory production grew. “Kashrut supervision emerges in concert with Procter & Gamble and other large companies producing goods,” said Eleff.
Modern factory production involves long supply chains stretching around the world. Before a product hits the shelves, its ingredients may be the work of a dozen factories that come together in a final product, and every step of that process needs to be certified to receive the OU stamp. Today, Elefant employs some 55 rabbis at the OU’s office in New York, and hundreds more in the field.
While certification has expanded the options available to the kosher consumer, the consumer has changed how food is made. “There’s a holiday on the Jewish calendar you probably haven’t heard of: It’s the day Oreos received kosher certification,” Elefant joked. “It’s not because we at the OU did such a great job of convincing them to become certified. I wish it were true, but it’s totally not. … It’s because Oreos decided to stop using animal fat.”
The decision by Nabisco, the bestselling cookie’s maker, to eliminate lard from its ingredients in the early 1990s coincided with legislation in the U.S. requiring nutritional labeling on all packaged foods, which led many producers to drop ingredients that made kosher certification an impossibility.
“The fact that people are much more sensitive to what they eat has been a perfect environment for the growth of kosher,” Elefant said, adding that some companies reach out to him because they believe that a kosher stamp can improve their marketing.
He also noted that his office closely tracks changing perceptions on the nutrition of different ingredients that might affect the kosher market — such as renewed discussion over the qualities of animal fats versus seed oils spurred by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In addition, the core kosher consumer has become more sophisticated. “They’re not the kosher consumer my parents were, for whom a simple diet was more than enough,” Elefant said. “It’s a very new world, and people are much more into the food that they eat.”
Today, kosher certification is no longer just restricted to Jewish heritage foods, but is conferred on cuisines from around the world. Kosher consumers, meanwhile, have become more exacting in their expectations of what can be certified.
“When we were younger, people ate a lot of food based on assumption,” Elefant said, pointing to the long-standing idea that all beer is kosher. “The kosher consumer today is a much more serious consumer and (is) not looking for shortcuts. So, on one hand, they want a real kosher product. They don’t want any assumptions. On the other hand, they want everything.
“This has been my experience for a while and it’s my experience with the topic of beer. People aren’t upset at us that we changed the status of beer. People respect that we made a decision, but they’re also saying, ‘Now give us kosher beer!’” Elefant said.
