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12 Oct 08
kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process food goes through before it reaches the table. “The core of kashrut is the idea of limiting oneself, that not everything that we can consume should be consumed,” Kastner said. “I wouldn’
food religion jewish agriculture community locavore meat PETA
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traditional values of kashrut: community-based supervision of the food supply, reverence for agriculture and animal husbandry and attention to detail.
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Mitzvah Meat, slaughtered and processed 31 lambs and two grass-fed cows, all raised on farms in the Hudson Valley.
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In some American Jewish households, the raid on Agriprocessors started a deep conversation about the very meaning of kosher: is it simply about cutting an animal’s neck and butchering it in a specific way? Or is the ritual also meant to minimize an animal’s pain or to bring sanctity to its death? Does it matter how the animal was treated when it was alive? How about the workers who processed it? Is reverence for life possible in a factory-farming setting?
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In 2004, in response to tips about excessive use of cattle prods at the Postville plant, PETA, the animal rights group, sent undercover operatives into Agriprocessors, and they returned with especially gruesome footage of workers ripping out the tracheae of live cows after their throats had been cut. The PETA video was only the beginning of a long run of bad press for Agriprocessors. In 2006, The Forward, a national Jewish newspaper, published a long exposé claiming bad labor practices at the plant as well as health and safety violations. That May, Agriprocessors was the target of what was then the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history; 389 employees were arrested, and Iowa’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors and Aaron Rubashkin for more than 9,000 counts of child-labor violations.
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Perhaps surprisingly, more than 70 percent of kosher-food consumers in the United States are not observant Jews; they choose kosher products because they view them as safer or rely on the strict ingredient labeling for their food allergies or other religious concerns. According to a report released earlier this year by the Mintel International Group, a London-based market-research company, the observant Jewish population alone is not large enough to support the market for food bought specifically because it is kosher. (This finding is borne out by the dozens of candy and cookie companies that request kosher certification each year for special Christmas- and Easter-themed products.)
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kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process food goes through before it reaches the table. “The core of kashrut is the idea of limiting oneself, that not everything that we can consume should be consumed,” Kastner said. “I wouldn’t buy a ham sandwich, and I would also refrain from buying an exotic mangosteen imported from China, which wastes fossil fuels and is grown with pesticides.”
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he thinks that contemporary disconnection from our food sources is the cause of numerous environmental and social ills, like the national obesity epidemic. He wanted to be a shochet to help people make more healthful food choices and reconnect to the source of their food, and to encourage investment in local agriculture. He says the rules around kosher food — like the requirement that meat be slaughtered by a pious person with a certain intention and the requirement to say a blessing over every food acknowledging its source (land, tree, grain, other) — encourage mindful eating and discourage overconsumption of resources.
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