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January 25, 2012

Can we afford kosher lettuce?

By Jonah Lowenfeld

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Brenda Walt, owner of Catering by Brenda, started her business in 1987 under another kosher supervision agency and became RCC-certified in the 1990s.

Like many of those who agreed to be interviewed for this article, Walt, who lives a Modern Orthodox lifestyle and is Shabbat-observant, said she follows the policies of the RCC, even if she doesn’t always understand them.

“I’m pretty much one of those who do as I’m told — at least here in my business,” the South Africa native said. She said it’s been about six years since she last bought an ordinary head of romaine lettuce, and over that time, she has been following the RCC’s increasingly stringent guidelines.

Walt said she knew of another RCC-certified caterer who was so dissatisfied at being restricted to buying from the RCC-certified farm that he undertook his own lettuce comparison.

“He went up and bought Ready Pac, which he washed like one would wash,” Walt said, “and then he bought some [RCC-certified] kosher romaine lettuce, and then he sent it to an authorized laboratory.

“It turned out,” she said, “that the RCC lettuce had far more bugs than the one that he’d washed.”

The farms’ products might be “ridiculously expensive,” Walt said, but she felt the quality has improved. What bothered Walt most, however, wasn’t the added cost; it was what she saw as unnecessary waste.

During weeks when the RCC supervisors declare the harvest from the farm too bug-infested to sell, Walt said, she has to scramble to buy bags of Ready Pac lettuce. 

“Even though we buy the triple-washed lettuce,” Walt said, “we have to rewash it with soap.

“These are RCC rules, and I follow them to the last letter,” Walt said. “But I can’t tell you that it’s easy, and that I don’t hate the fact that when I have a busy weekend coming up, on Friday the water just pours out of the faucet for four hours without stop, because that’s what it takes to wash lettuce.”

In fact, it’s not just the water from Walt’s sinks that gets dumped during the weeks when the farm’s lettuce can’t be sold as kosher. According to Asyag, any harvested lettuce that isn’t up to the RCC’s standards ends up going straight into the trash.

“We throw away a lot,” Asyag said, estimating that about 20 percent of the previous year’s yield was discarded due to infestation.

Walt, who washes her own parsley to avoid having to buy the kosher farm’s more expensive parsley, does like one of the RCC-certified products, though: the dill, because cleaning the ordinary stuff is a difficult chore.

“It’s very hard to remove the microscopic bugs sticking to the leaves,” she said.

Daniel Javanfard of Sinai Glatt Kosher Catering said he doesn’t buy the farm’s produce because his clients are, for the most part, not observant, and so don’t want to pay the higher costs associated with the strictly supervised produce.

“I cannot tell my clients that this produce is coming from a Gush Katif-type farm,” he said, “because the clients we have in Los Angeles, they don’t care that much, and the economy — everything is up and down, up and down.”

Instead, Javanfard, who specializes in kosher Persian cuisine, uses pre-certified Ready Pac iceberg lettuce mix for his salads. And when he makes Israeli salad, rather than pay the premium, he’s been leaving out the parsley for the last three or four years.

“It’s not a slam dunk,” said Alex Felkai, the owner of Kosher on Location, who uses the farm’s produce when he caters a wedding, but not in the salads he serves daily to the students at New Community Jewish High School. Those are made with kosher-certified iceberg lettuce mix.

However, he said he understands why the farm’s prices are high.

“They are more expensive, but that’s part of providing kosher food,” he said. “We certainly do use it when we can.”

More difficult, Felkai said, is the unpredictability of the farm’s supply.

“Lately they haven’t been producing all the different crops that have been approved by the rabbis,” Felkai added. “I would have to call up on Monday this week, and hear, ‘We have this and this and this.’ It’s just hard to run a catering business like that.”

Kosher Broccoli: $5.50 per head, wholesale

Last October, when I reached Ilan Bender by phone at Bender Farms, his 100-acre ranch in Santa Paula, it was clear he was in no mood to talk about his short-lived stint as a kosher lettuce farmer.

“If you want to talk about kosher lettuce, I can only tell you bad stuff,” he said.

Bender, 75, was now working 12-hour days overseeing the construction of a $1.5 million factory on his ranch that will produce PVC-coated electrical conduit, the kind of wiring used in highly corrosive environments, like sewage treatment plants and offshore drilling rigs.

This project is, for Bender, a return to his roots. Born in Israel, Bender came to the United States in 1959. He studied engineering at what is now California State University, Los Angeles, and came up with the idea of coating electrical conduit while working in his garage.

His venture into kosher agriculture was different. Bender bought the Santa Paula ranch 12 years ago, and sometime around 2007 — he was hazy about exact dates — he said Vann and Asyag approached him and suggested they grow kosher vegetables at Bender Farms.

The kosher business eventually took up about 10 acres of his ranch, but starting out, Bender had some concerns, chief among them the possibility of another grower competing with him on price.

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A version of this article appeared in print.

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I cant comment now im off to get my 1st big Mac

Comment by jake Marx on 1/25/12 at 9:38 pm

Interesting concept. If one in 5,000 heads is bad, all the heads are bad and condemned to death or at least, to be non kosher.

Maybe we should do that with people. Say a small city of 5,000 christians has one police officer that is a nazi, complete with swastika tattoo on his chest. Since that officer works for the city and represents the city and the city serves and represents the people (in a republic or representative democracy), then we can use the same kosher rule. All the christians in that city are nazis.

Comment by joybook on 1/27/12 at 12:50 pm

continued

Of course we have to remember that this is not out of the realm of reality. All Nazis were and are christians. So, something like this could be true. It is definitely something to think about in a country where disenfranchised people are beaten and murdered by the police every week.

Comment by joybook on 1/27/12 at 12:51 pm

Great. More pesticides. Exactly what we need.

Comment by Rina on 1/27/12 at 2:33 pm

This is a new idea in the last decade, after thousands of years of simply washing and checking lettuce & other vegetables for bugs, Now we suddenly can only buy certified lettuce.  Hogwash.

Comment by Openeyes on 1/27/12 at 4:41 pm

While going to these extremes for the sake of kashrut is not what I would do, there a foodies all over this city who pay outrageous amounts of money for coffee drinks, molecular gastronomic meals and exotic sushi.  So, if someone wants to buy bug free lettuce, or refuses to eat Brussels sprouts, who’s to criticize what’s, at worst, just another culinary fetish?

Comment by Jeffrey on 1/27/12 at 7:32 pm

Wouldn’t it be more “Jewish” to take the additional amount that you would be willing to pay for “kosher” lettuce and and donate that amount to a food bank? Hhhmm….rinsing a bug off a lettuce leaf once a year vs. a family having food to eat. Tough choice.

Comment by Wendy on 1/28/12 at 1:06 am

Please don’t malign all insects ! Examples of kosher insects include the locust, the cricket, and the grasshopper (read Vayikra 11 carefully). Moreover, fried crickets don’t taste all that bad (common in Thailand). So you don’t have to wash away all the insects

Comment by Gershom on 1/28/12 at 3:37 am

1 of x: Let me understand this:  HaShem would rather His allegedly “chosen” people be poisoned with pesticides rather than have natural products merely touched by His creations.  Why not start using a microscope?  After all, there is no size limitation in the Torah or Talmud, and we know how to track even smaller insects.  Do you think that insects are limited to one millimeter?  Unlike many other religions and philosophies, HaShem offers us the chance to think, to question, to debate. (...)

Comment by Jared on 1/28/12 at 12:15 pm

2 of x:  I’ll bet my immortal soul that HaShem is more concerned with how we treat each other and the world He gave us for 364 days a year than He is impressed with requests for forgiveness on one day each year, and our willingness to invoke ever more hypertechnicalities in His name. (...)

Comment by Jared on 1/28/12 at 12:16 pm

3 of 3: Today one millimeter, tomorrow electron microscopes?  How dare we stop at a level of convenience?  Of course, while we don’t eat pigs, we don’t go around killing them, either ... same for lobsters. But insects, well, they’re ... insects ... so let’s kill them AND poison His people at the same time. You know, based upon a few lines from Genesis, you could actually prove that this level of behavior is a sin against HaShem. Never mind ... it’s just not worth it.

Comment by Jared on 1/28/12 at 12:17 pm

Let’s see…  with all that is going on in the world, the LAJJ editor-in-chief thinks stories about a Jewish actor (a couple of weeks ago) and kosher lettuce are important enough to be major cover stories.

What an embarrassment!

Comment by paul jeser on 1/28/12 at 3:02 pm

AS president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, I think we should also consider if we can afford to continue to eat meat, since the production of meat and other animal products contributes very significantly to climate change, worldwide hunger, water and energy shortages, and many other environmental threats to all of humanity

Comment by Richard Schwartz on 1/29/12 at 2:24 am

One has to ask if something was fine 50 years ago, what’s changed?
1) checking for bugs is a terrific make-work project for women. Keeps women confused and frightened about kashrut, further ensuring more rabbinic control over their lives.
2) at 5.50 for a (checked) broccoli, the costs add up fast to feed a family. So another vitamin-packed vegetable, like kale, spinach, brussel sprouts and cauliflower, gets sidelined.
Not in my house.

Comment by Dorothy Lipovenko on 1/30/12 at 6:59 am

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