Kosher
Kosher food laws followed the laws in the bible. The book of laws, translated from Hebrew into Greek is called Leviticus (then translated into Latin and finally into English).
The food laws include, but are not limited to the following:
No pork.
No shellfish.
No meat mixed with milk.
Food must be either prepared by somebody Jewish (so they know about all the above) or be supervised by a learned Jewish person such as a rabbi or shochet. (I remember reading that at the turn of the 1900s a wealthy orthodox man - I think there was one in Singapore - employed his own shochet to kill the meat and prepare it, when at home or when travelling, having first inspected the animal to see it was not diseased. )
Observing The Sabbath
The Hatch End branch of B & K, according to their website is now kosher. I had a chat with them once about this. They said as far as they are concerned, they service kosher food, like your mother does. But they can't get a Kosher license from the London Beth Din (or Manchester or any other UK city), which is an advantage because they don't have to pay for the inspection. The reason was that to comply with the Beth Din, they would have to close on the Sabbath, sunset to sundown, varying in the UK with the season (like restaurants and shops in Golders Green and North West London.
Kosher - if you care, or care to know
However, since the supermarkets such as Tesco are selling kosher food in a chiller cabinet, and kosher wines, in a shop which is open on Saturday employing non-Jewish staff (who by Jewish laws, according to one law must be allowed to rest on the Jewish Sabbath, but that presumes they are in your employ and work on Sunday, or are allowed to work on the Sabbath like the kosher goy who can light your fire. (Elvis Presley was the one who lit the oven for the Jewish lady who lived upstairs.)
So, assuming it is OK for Tesco and other supermarkets to sell kosher food on Saturday, it should be OK. (It is rather like your Jewish mother or granny, if she is frum - meaning orthodox, serving food on Sabbath. How can she do that? She can say, 'this is one I prepared earlier'. In my view, logically, it would also be OK to be served by non-Jews who have a different day of rest. Then it must be OK for the owners, who are not Jewish, or not necessarily Jewish. The same must apply to their staff who for a day of rest get Monday off.
Unfortunately, recently I have seen supermarkets cover their Jewish section on Jewish holidays, which is a real nuisance if you are on your way to an event and urgently need a bottle of kosher wine, whether it is to serve to Jewish people or be props when you give a talk to a mixed audience about the Jewish holidays.
Other kosher foods may be distributed around a supermarket, such as chocolates which are marked as kosher, in case Jewish people want to buy them, but are generally bought by any passer-by who happens to want a cake or biscuit.
In practice, I expect somebody could tell Tesco or another supermarket to cover their kosher section during a religious holiday or the Sabbath.
However, large numbers of kosher items, packaged goods with the words kosher in tiny 10 point type, find themselves all over huge supermarkets. Matzos are often found in two places. In the kosher section. Again in the bread sections. The same goes for cakes, biscuits, chocolates, halva, wine.
I am not an authority. This is just to give you a pointer as to what to check on.
Stories
Barmitzvah At An Italian Restaurant in London, England
What could go wrong?
1 To economize and for convenience, a non-Orthodox family holds their son's bar mitzvah party, not in a kosher restaurant, not at a synagogue hall or banqueting hall with a kosher caterer, but in a nearby smaller Italian restaurant. To please their more Orthodox Jewish friends the family has asked for a meal with no pork, opting for a fish meal so they can have milky coffee and desserts contained milk and milky white sauce on the fish.
It is all very grand and appealing. We start with smoked salmon. However, the restaurant serves the starter decorated with prawns!
Oops. Prawns are shellfish. Not allowed. What to do?
Send all starters back? Chuck them all in the bin?
Surreptitiously remove prawns from the ones served to the first table? Or leave prawns as leftovers for the family and staff. Manage to serve the rest of the food without the prawns. Provide a fruit alternative to those ultra-fussy people who now suspect that the chef has simply removed prawns and sent back the contaminated smoked salmon.
Who will pay for the mistake? What about the delay waiting for food? The embarrassment. The stress.
The restaurant and staff are no longer there. This event was in the nineteen-nineties at an Italian restaurant in Hatch End which closed down and changed name and ownership and food nationality several times. The boy is now an adult. But we often talk about it.
"Do you remember the time when the restaurant served prawns at a bar mitzvah!"
"Oh, yes!"
2 You would think that the simple solution would be to stick to a vegetarian diet for everybody. Who could mind? What could go wrong.
Your Jewish friends are happy. Their Moslem guests knowing there's no pork will be happy. (Although one said you should not mix eggs and fish.)
3 What about your other international guests with assorted diets?
Some 'vegetarians' avoid meat but will eat fish.
Story
INDIAN DIET
We went out with Indian friends to Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Two married couples, English and Indian. We had a buffet, shared the food platters which included at least one meat meal.
A couple of weeks later, I invited my new girlfriend for lunch. I suggested an Indian restaurant. She vetoed it. She was eating vegetarian. I was puzzled.
"Why?" I asked. I thought you ate meat at Raffles?"
"Yes," she said, "But today is devoted to a different God, and I have to be vegetarian."
We went to a vegetarian restaurant. It took me a day or two to feel relaxed about this idea. I had grown up in England, at that time surrounded by people following two of the world's one God religions, speaking English. I went to a local Church of England secondary school, but the day's of the week in English are named after pagan or Norse gods. Monday is moon day. Thursday is Thor's day. I reasoned that the days of the week are named after different Gods.
Christians change their diet. Catholics used to give up meat and eat fish on Fridays. Out of deference to the Catholic girl pupils and staff, my Church of England girls' grammar school on Friday served fried fish or a quiche containing eggs and cheese but no meat.
During Lent, Christians give up certain foods. Each household has a different diet normally. So each person can choose what to give up. (No point in giving up meat if you don't normally eat it.)
Jews give up leavened bread for Pesach (Passover). According to a Discovery programme, this might go all the way back to a rainy spring in Pharaoh's time. The moisture from one year's wet weather caused the stored grain to grow mould. It led to what used to be called St Vitus's Dance. The eldest boy child would be five years older than the next. The firstborn would get a double helping of food at late night dinner time, in the year of contaminated harvest a double portion of the contaminated food. Hence the death of the firstborn who were all found dead, slain by an invisible force in the night.
To prevent last year's crop infecting the new spring harvest, all the old flour was finished off with spring cleaning. The mould situation was so serious that every year you had everything cleared out. Stored foods had no 'use by' nor 'sell by' dates in those days. Besides, the majority of ordinary people could not read.
Story
I went to visit Jewish friend whose daughter had married an ultra-Orthodox boy. I played safe and took them a pot plant. They said they would have to keep the pot plant in the garage during Pesach, in case it had any insects which would contaminate the house.
Vegans
The vegans are stricter than vegetarians who won't eat meat, and the no meat and fish eaters. Vegans won't eat anything taken from an animal. They won't have eggs, milk, milk products such as butter, cream, yogurt and cheese.
Ok, so we've cut out meat, fish, cheese, eggs, milk, butter, what else could go wrong?
The Jains only eat food from above the ground, so no potatoes.
No fish and chips then.
Let's look at it another way. Who can we invite?
Let's invite the Chinese over for a Chinese meal. It is said that the Chinese eat anything (with four legs) except the table!
Oh, but what about allergies? One in four Asians has an intolerance to milk. The Asians are therefore not big on cheese. The Japanese don't like spicy food.
A Chinese friend of mine has one daughter who eats and drinks everything, another girl can't tolerate milk products.
My other good friend who is Chinese is married to a man who developed or discovered late in life that he had a gluten intolerance. She started a gluten free food business in Singapore. Her husband can't eat bread. Biscuits. Gluten is in everything. Or might be. As my husband once said of me, when I expressed lukewarm enthusiasm for accompanying him hiking up Everest with a Sherpa who would be carrying and cooking vegan rations, except for Yak food.) "Don't come with us, dearest. Even you enjoyed yourself, nobody else would!"
Gosh - everybody's got a problem with something. Those who don't have a problem today could develop an allergy tomorrow. So could I.
I think I'll just sit on my own and eat a grape and drink water. But I can plan my next restaurant meal. Let the other diners and the restaurant manager sort things out for themselves.
Sometimes it seems as if the world's problems and difficulties are multiplying since I was a child, multiplying every day. But that's what happens when you travel and others travel to you. A constant discovery of new products and new ideas.
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
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