Nadya Strizhevskaya was born in Moscow and moved to New York at the age of 7. She’s a graduate of Barnard College and is a Pardes Alum. She has lived and worked in Moscow, Los Angeles, and New York and has been working for public and private Jewish philanthropies for a few years now. These days, she’s trying to figure out how to start a garden on the fire escape of her Park Slope apartment.

Soon after I graduated college ad started keeping kosher (no connection between the two), I took a job in Moscow. Despite the revival of Jewish life in Russia, it is still not a place where kosher food is readily available. Soon after arriving, I was sent a link to an obscure website that allowed me to download a list of approved Russian food products; none had a *hechsher* (label that certified the product kosher) per se, but a team of inspectors, under the supervision of one of Russia’s chief rabbis (there are two), made regular trips to select Russian factories to ensure that the small minority of observant Russian Jews could eat something other than fruits and vegetables. I was happy when I could buy these products, but I admit that my standards of kashrut were more of a Michael Pollan spin-off: nothing with more than 5 few ingredients, all of which I could identify as non-treif (and I’m pretty sure my great grandmother would have recognized what I was buying, too).

When I would venture out to the kosher store—a hastily put-together shack behind the synagogue with no signs to indicate its purpose—I’d feel compelled to buy everything just because it was allowed. But then I’d take another look at the Israeli products and ask myself: do I really want Bam Bam? Will I put those really yellow noodles into my soup just because they’re kosher? Wouldn’t I be better off making my favorite banana bread than buying that packaged desert loaf? Most of the time, the answers were no, no, and yes. I’d make due with some kosher wine and vinegar and be on my way…to the other side of the shack, where the meat packaging happened. I don’t want to make it sound like Jewish life in 21st century Moscow resembles a shtetl…the kosher butcher did not do his work right in front of me, and I didn’t know the chickens before I took them home, but there was
something transparent about the way this meat was cut up, packaged, and sold. (What wasn’t transparent were the bags you’d be asked to put the meat in, so that people outside couldn’t tell that there was an under-the-radar economy going on in the synagogue’s back yard.)

So by the time that I read Michael Pollan’s article in the New York Times magazine (Jan 2007) where he laid out the simple principles of healthy eating, I was already living on the fringes of the industrial food chain—not even because I made a conscious choice, but because that was the only way I could observe a level of kashrut that satisfied my standards. I am amazed to realize that the year I spent in Russia was the only time in my life (thus far) where Jewish law gave me almost no other choice than to be a more conscious consumer in the environmental sense. Or maybe I should say a more conscious creator (thank you Andrew Kimbrell for making this distinction at Hazon’s 2009 food conference)—and create I did: that was the year of everything made from scratch, and it really helped me learn how to cook, too! When there is no prepackaged food to eat, and when you know that pork gelatin lurks in every simple looking Russian desert, your relationship to food can’t but change.

But now fast forward to 2009—I am living in New York with officially hechshered food galore, but continuing to be a creator is harder and harder. I think about this all the time, but what propelled me into this current tirade was a recent article in *The New Yorker *titled “Kosher Takeout.” I am not in disagreement with anything in the piece per se, and I enjoyed reading it from an intellectual standpoint, but as a Jew for whom kashrut
is, for now, a part of my Jewish practice, something really rubbed me the wrong way.

The article describes the booming food industry in China, in which organizations like the OU have been participating by sending dozens of mashgihim (kosher inspectors) to certify Chinese-made products. The international kosher market, the author points out, is estimated to be $165 billion a year and thus getting Chinese food companies involved benefits everyone: the kosher certifying agencies, the factory owners, the Chinese
government, and the consumer. Hmmm. The consumer?

In some ways, yes. Kosher consumers take comfort in the OU symbol, or star K, or whatever hechsher fits their standards. But I remember a few years ago getting into a fight with a boyfriend about Entenmanns’s. For some reason, I got on this long tirade about how ridiculous it is that a Jewish parent would give their child Entenmanns’s chocolate cake with chocolate frosting on top just because it’s kosher. I know what you are thinking, and the boyfriend said the same thing—stop confusing kosher and healthy; the OU, as Rabbi Seth Mandel pointed out at the 2009 Food Conference, specializes in
Jewish law and food, not nutrition; Jewish law can’t enforce that people eat healthy. But isn’t this still a source of mixed signals? Is it not necessary for us to develop an understanding that kosher can’t be a black or white affair anymore, and that there need to be levels of kosher (with choosing whole foods over processed food-like substances necessarily moving you further up the ladder)? I’m not saying anything mind-bogglingly original—I’m just perplexed at the way in which being Jewish can actually propel our
alienation from our food supply, and that for the unassuming kosher consumer who is certainly not reading the Jew and the Carrot blog, Chinese-originated “Wow mix” is allowed in the pantry.

One of the rabbis featured in the New Yorker article is described as carrying a duffel bag containing his provisions for the 2-week trip from Israel to China. The ingredients? “Twelve long-life gamma-irradiated meals that he heats up on top of the hotel kettle, some packages of instant noodle soup, sealed pouches of tuna and salmon, crackers, rice cakes, and wafers.” Um, gross? The author was poking slight fun at the craziness of keeping strictly kosher, and that’s an idea that pervades the whole story. But I’m not irked by that. What irks me is that one and a quarter billion dollars in kosher-certified ingredients are exported worldwide from China each year. I know we can’t separate ourselves from the industrial food chain completely (though Wendell Berry might argue with that), but should we putting ourselves in it for the sake of something being labeled kosher?