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January 25, 2012

Can we afford kosher lettuce?

By Jonah Lowenfeld

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“It’s a very specialized product, and it’s a very small market,” Bender said. The greenhouses are expensive, and he was hesitant to make such a significant up-front investment.

Vann and Asyag put him at ease, though. “They pretty much gave me the assurance that it would be a small operation and protected for price,” Bender said.

For the RCC, establishing a kosher lettuce monopoly wouldn’t be difficult. According to its Web site, the RCC certifies more than 50 kosher establishments in Los Angeles — restaurants, bakeries, caterers — along with nine kosher markets. Because any certified kosher product these businesses use has to be approved by the RCC, if Vann wanted to ensure that Bender Farms wouldn’t face competition, he could do so simply by declining to approve any other producer of fresh kosher produce.

Bender Farms grew mostly romaine lettuce, but also parsley, dill and cilantro.

“We were very successful with broccoli and cauliflower,” Bender said, listing two products Asyag doesn’t currently offer. But even if Bender Farms was offering bug-free kosher broccoli, its asking price was a non-starter. Last week, conventionally grown broccoli crowns were retailing at Glatt Mart for 69 cents a pound, which comes out to less than $2 a head. Bender Farms’ broccoli was priced at about $5.50 per head, wholesale.

“The end user loved us,” said Bender, adding that he, too, had received phone calls from satisfied customers. But in many cases, the RCC-certified kosher markets refused to pay his asking price. 

Bender and Asyag’s working relationship dissolved quickly. According to Bender, Asyag asked for a too large a share of the profits from their joint venture.

For his part, Asyag said it was exactly the opposite. “Not only did he fail,” Asyag said of Bender, “he was trying to steal the business. Bottom line, he wanted this whole thing for himself.”

After splitting from Bender, Asyag started California Kosher Farms with another grower in 2008 and, despite the earlier assurances Bender said he’d gotten, began to compete with his former partner. Bender feels particularly burned by Vann’s decision to award RCC certification to Asyag’s produce.

“When Yossi left me, he [Vann] shouldn’t have allowed him to compete with us,” Bender said, “because it destroyed the business.”

But while Bender told a story of a business-killing price war, Asyag said that Bender’s business failed because he priced his produce at a level no consumer would be willing to pay. Even Vann knew as much, Asyag said.

“He [Bender] came to the market and wanted to sell a head of lettuce to the supermarket at $3.75,” Asyag said. “At that point, the rabbi told me there is no business.”

And while Asyag wouldn’t disclose his exact wholesale prices, he said today they are “less than half” of the $3.75 Bender wanted to charge in 2009.

At the retail level, Asyag said, “The prices are right; the prices are cheap. The lettuce is $6.50 [a head] in New York. In L.A., it’s $2.99 to $3.50 a head.”

Asyag said he hasn’t yet made money selling his lettuce, and it is possible that he has been pricing it below cost for the past four years in an effort to build market share. But that seems unlikely. Bender got out of the business in 2009; he sold Vann the truck he bought to deliver produce to Los Angeles each week; the greenhouses have been leased to a grower of organic and conventional herbs. Asyag, now the only grower supplying RCC-certified lettuce to Los Angeles, should have no reason to voluntarily take a loss on his product.

“You have to pray a lot.”

“In general, the council policy is always not to encourage monopolies,” Vann said last week while waiting at a car wash near the Calabasas Shul, the Orthodox synagogue in Calabasas Park where he has been the rabbi since 1995. “Sometimes you need to have assistance to get something off the ground, but, long-term, monopolies are not in the interests of the community.”

Vann even hinted at the possibility that certain developments — improved washing technology, for instance — could spur the RCC to make changes to its kosher program, even in ways that could go against the interest of the farm at times.

“He mentioned that,” Asyag said. And while some new machine might make bagged lettuce an RCC-worthy alternative to his lettuce, Asyag said what would really drive the RCC to change its policies would be if he were unable to provide a reliable supply of kosher, bug-free lettuce.

“Not having it on a weekly basis throws the market off,” Asyag said. Any week when his product isn’t available, the caterers and restaurant owners call Vann, asking him to let them wash the only other kind of romaine lettuce they are allowed to use — the bagged, triple-washed Ready Pac brand.

“What do you think the rabbi says?” Asyag said. “ ‘OK, I’ll let you wash it.’ ”

Even those calls sound pleasant, compared to the phone calls the certifying rabbis from the RCC and those who certify Asyag’s produce for Bodek have gotten in the event a bug is found. After all, unlike, say, non-kosher beef, which might look and taste exactly like kosher beef, a bug found in a bag of kosher lettuce is undeniable evidence.

“If the product is marked kosher, and people check it, and it’s not kosher, then they call,” Asyag said. “They call the rabbi and they give him hell.”

“You can tell afterward whether there’s bugs in it,” Vann said. “That’s why you have to pray a lot. You pray, you do a lot of homework, you do your best, and you ask God — help us. I encourage everybody to do that.”

Asyag hired a new Israeli grower to assist him in October 2011, his fourth in five years, and he’s optimistic about the future. The farm has had a 100 percent success rate in keeping the produce bug-free since I visited in November, and Asyag occasionally talks about possible avenues for the business to expand — like “kosher organic” lettuce or bringing kosher lettuce into mainstream supermarkets.

“My idea was to feed the Jewish people at effective prices,” Asyag said. Even so, he knows that the pressure — from businesses and individuals — on the rabbis who certify his product is intense.

“This is the last chance,” he said.

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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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