Kosher Kidz

[Music] Hi there. Welcome to the show. Today we got a lot of really neat stuff to talk about. We're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects, food. Not just any food, kosher food. Believe it or not, most people don't know what kosher food is. Do you know what kosher food is? One of our reporters went to the streets to find out. Some think it's Jewish food, like princesses or bagels or my bubby's famous chicken soup. Some people think that a rabbi blesses the food and that makes it kosher. Many people think that if you look at the ingredients on the package, you can tell the product is kosher, right? All of these are wrong. So, what exactly is kosher food? Having a kosher product means everything that's in the food and the way it's made is according to the Jewish dietary laws. There are four main groups of non-cooser. Some animals like a pig, some birds like a raven, and some fish like a catfish, and insects aren't kosher. Making food kosher is a complicated and fascinating process, and it requires the expertise of a kosher certification agency such as the Orthodox Union. They have the responsibility to ensure that foods bearing their name are supervised to the highest standards. The little OU you see on hundreds of thousands of products is the most recognized and respected kosher symbol in the world. I'm going to open up my computer and introduce you to my pal, Rabbi Luben. He works at the OU headquarters. Hi, Rabbi. How are you? I'm good, Ezra. How are you? I'm great. So, what can you tell us about the OU? Well, Ezra, as you know, the OU is the world's largest kosher supervising agency. We certify over 500,000 products made by over 4,500 companies in over 80 countries around the world. Wow, that's unbelievable. How many people are involved in supervising all those products? There are literally hundreds of people around the world that inspect these plants. These specially trained inspectors are called mashikim, which is a Hebrew word that means supervisors. Here at the OU, we call them rabbitic field representatives. So, a lot more goes into supervising a product than just visiting the plant. That's right, Ezra. Kosher supervision is very complex because companies often use a multitude of ingredients to make even the most simple products. Even something as simple as your bowl of ice cream is really not that simple. How complicated could it be? It's just milk, sugar, and eggs. Ezra, have you ever had cherry pie? Yeah, my mom makes the best cherry pie. Just cherries and flour and eggs, right? I think she uses one of those cherry flavoring packages. Well, if that package isn't kosher certified, you might just be eating parts of an African cat. Ew, that's gross. Most food products today have ingredients like stabilizers, colors, flavors, and other ingredients that are added that may contain non-coosher components. Civot is a flavor enhancer that comes from a small African mammal called a civet, which is related to the cat family. Castorum is a flavor enhancer that comes from beavers, and carmine is often added to foods to give them red color. It's made from groundup beetles. You also have enzymes which are used in food for many different reasons. Did you know there's an enzyme that comes directly from a pig? Enzymes can be grown on blood, monkey brains, eels, you name it. These ingredients are in cereals, fruit cocktails, and even lunch snacks. In fact, the average all-American breakfast most probably contains some of these. Not mine. Well, I guess that brings us back to where we started. Ice cream. Yeah, right. Well, I kind of lost my appetite. So, maybe we'll take a break from the monkey brains and show you how ice cream is made. My favorite ice cream is made by Safeway in Seattle, Washington. So, we went to Seattle to visit their plant. Check this out. This is really cool. No pun intended. At Safeway, they make all kinds of tasty ice cream products in over 30 flavors. They make gallon and half gallon containers, Dixie Cups, different kinds of ice cream sandwiches, and my favorite, crunchy fudge bars. All the products made at Safeway are kosher except for their fruit bars and their Rocky Road ice cream that has non-coosher marshmallow in it. This is important when it comes to kosher supervision because kosher and non-coosher products are made in the same equipment. More on that later. Let's see how ice cream is made. All of these great ice cream products start with basic ingredients. Cream, sugar, and stabilizers. Stabilizers are used to give the ice cream its smooth texture. The milk and cream comes to the plant in these big trucks. It is pumped from the truck into a holding tank and from there it enters the plant where it is blended into the basic flavorless mixture that is also called the batch mixture. There are two basic mixtures that are made. One is plain and the other has cocoa added which is used as the base for all the chocolate flavored products. The next step is called pasteurization. Pasteurization is a method of heating every particle of the mixture so that it's guaranteed that any possible trace of bacteria is removed. Some types of bacteria are good but bacteria found in food isn't and it can make you very sick. From there, it goes into storage silos, which is followed by the mixture being put into flavor tanks where various flavors are added, including eggs and vanilla to create many varieties of ice cream that Safeway produces. There can be lots of ingredients that go into making flavors themselves. At Safeway, they have a flavor room where they create every flavor. Once the flavor is added, the mixture goes through a complex freezing process where air is added to give it the fluffy creamy ice cream consistency. At that point, if other ingredients like chocolate chunks need to be added, the mixture is diverted to a fruit feeder where the fruit feeder drops those ingredients into the ice cream at a certain rate. I don't know why they call it a fruit feeder if it's adding chocolate, but maybe we can find that out another time. The next step is to fill the containers with the soft ice cream. Now the containers are filled and the ice cream is sent off to this huge freezer where it is frozen solid. This place is the size of a football field. Did you know that ice cream is like fine wine? It has to sit there for at least 24 hours to blossom. It's kind of like my mother's chicken soup. It always tastes better the next day. While the ice cream is blossoming, they perform various tests to ensure that the ice cream meets all the standards of safety and quality. Now, the ice cream is ready to go. It's taken from the freezer, loaded onto the truck, and taken to my local grocery store. This is where I come in. I add it to my mom's shopping list, and bingo, it ends up on my breakfast table. Well, now that you've seen how ice cream is made, let's see if you were paying attention. Did you notice anything that could be problematic in ensuring that Safeway's OU products are guaranteed kosher? Safeway makes non- kosher products as well. So, how do we know that non-coosher ingredients won't be mixed up with kosher ingredients and end up in the ice cream by accident? That's an excellent question. If there are ingredients used in the plant that aren't kosher, the U must make sure that those non-cooser ingredients are not compatible with the company's kosher ingredients. Safeway makes a strawberry fruit bar that is not kosher. They also make a strawberry ice cream that is kosher. However, the two mixes are different. The fruit bar mixture is chunky and the ice cream mixture is very smooth. The non- kosher chunky mix can't be used in the ice cream because it will change the consistency of the ice cream. Therefore, the ingredient is considered incompatible with the kosher ingredient which removes any concern that will be substituted in the ice cream. Is that the only problem that could happen? Definitely not. Ingredients that are heated can also be a problem because heating non-coosher ingredients will cause the equipment to become non-cooser as well. Remember when the ice cream mixture was pasteurized? Because it gets so hot, the pasteurizer could make the kosher ice cream mixture non-cosher if the pasteurizer had non-coosher ingredients at any time. I guess that's like what my mom does at home with our pots and pans. We can't mix them up, right? Exactly. But Safeway makes non-coosher products on the same equipment. They make Rocky Road ice cream, which has marshmallows in it that aren't kosher. Really? How can they do that and still be kosher? Well, the marshmallows are added to the mixture when it's very cold. If the mixture is cold, kosher law says the equipment won't become non-coosher. Just like if your mom puts cold milk in a meat pot by accident, the pot must be thoroughly cleaned out, but it doesn't become non-coosher. The equipment is thoroughly cleaned every night before they start a new kosher run in the morning. Wow, look at how carefully they clean the machines. They take every bolt apart. Could you imagine what my mom would say if I did that when she asked me to clean my room? She would be so happy. Okay, Rabbi. So, that pretty much covers everything that could go wrong, right? Well, not exactly. The last thing, and perhaps one of the most important, is to make sure the label is kosher. What? No one eats the label unless they're making spitballs out of it. We're not worried about anyone eating it. We're concerned that the wrong label might go on the package. At the OU, we have to make sure that kosher certified ice cream bears the U label. Wouldn't most people know that ice cream is dairy? Maybe. But if it just had a plain U logo on it, they might think it's par of ice cream, which means that it has no dairy or meat ingredients in it. Without a D on the label, they might serve it on their steak or chicken. Chicken alam mode. It doesn't sound so appetizing. I can't say I'd ever do that by accident. Maybe not. But you might put worse chair sauce on your steak. What's wrong with that? There's no rocky road in a bottle of steak sauce. But there is fish in it. That's why we put an O fish label on it because kosher law prohibits mixing meat and fish at the same time, too. There's also UP, which stands for Passover. That's so you know that the product doesn't have hummets in it, which we all know we can't eat during the holiday of Passover. Rabbi, can I offer you some breakfast? No thanks. I'm having ice cream for lunch today. I've actually got to run now. It's been great speaking to you and I hope I was able to answer your questions. Well, now you've got a taste of just how complex kosher food production is. It's more than just the label on the box. It's a lot of highly trained people working together with the manufacturer to make sure that the highest standards of Jewish law is maintained. After all, when you're eating kosher, you're not just feeding your belly, you're feeding your soul. [Music] Fire. [Music]