Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher AuthoritySueFishkoff. New York: Schoken Books, 2010.

Abstract

Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America's Food Answers to a Higher Authority Sue Fishkoff. New York: Schoken Books, 2010. Food is hot; not just in its eating, but as an observational and participatory activity, in journalism, and in the scholarly worlds. Works like Eric Schlosser's 2005 expose Fast Food have brought food from the supermarket, refrigerator, and dinner table into the classroom. Carolyn Walker Bynum's groundbreaking work Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1988), but also more recently Daniel Sack's 2001 work Whitebread Protestants (and others), have expanded the view to include investigations of the religious aspects of food - not in the traditional, anthropological (and often hyper-theoretical) manner of such works as Mary Douglas's classic text Purity and Danger (1978), but in a more familiar, contemporary, and mundane style that is accessible to the general reader but of value to the student as well. Sue Fishkoff's latest work falls nicely into this last category. Not quite the (you'll excuse the pun) hamhanded tour de force of Schlosser's work - which in the food studies world seems to be the ur-text for anything with the title Nation appended to it - this work draws more directly from her first work exploring the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) world in The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch (2005). The subtitle - a reference to a long-running series of advertisements for Hebrew National hotdogs (which were less contaminated than others because they answer to a Higher Authority) - hides the twin dynamic driving the work: on the one hand, kosher food is a growing market in the United States because of a perfect storm of Jewish cultural confidence and non-Jewish food anxieties; on the other hand, within the American Jewish community there is a growing demand for - and battle over - foods identified as ritually permissible for consumption. The book is an impressive survey of topics related to the observance of kashrut (the Jewish system of dietary requirements), covering everything (as they might say in this world) from soup to nuts. After a introductory tour of the kosher world, there are chapters on the observance of kashrut, the kosher certification agencies, the Mashgiach (kosher butcher), the Jewish Deli (with a discussion of both the kosher and the kosherstyle deli), kosher wines, kosher food marketing, the internationalization of food packaging and the impact that has had on kosher certification, new styles in American kashrut observance, disputes over what can be considered kosher (and who gets to decide), and (to be expected) the scandal that rocked the kosher meateating world when Agriprocessors (of Stephen Bloom's 2001 Postville fame) was raided by federal marshals for immigration violations. …