According to the New York Times, grocery stores are seeing increasing interest from their customers in kosher foods.  This ancient dietary regime is perceived as being healthier, which is enough to persuade many people to give kosher a try.

Kosher hot dogs have enjoyed a huge popularity for a long time, of course.  Hot dogs, out of all your basic meat products, are widely considered one of the most revolting.  "Everything from the squeal to the tail" is one of the (more family friendly) sayings.  I have many friends who are not in the least bit Jewish, but who insist on eating only kosher hot dogs.  

Kosher meat products specifically are thought by many to have a much lower risk of contamination.  Kosher laws require that the animal be slaughtered in a particular way (through bloodletting) which many people feel is more humane than other methods.  Because the meat has to be inspected at several points throughout the processing, many people feel that this reduces the risk of the sloppy handling that often causes contamination in non-kosher meats.  

Just because there is no empirical evidence to back up these beliefs doesn't keep people from choosing kosher.  Kosher foods often cost more than their non-kosher counterparts, because the extra handling means that it takes longer to make.  This no doubt helps to contribute to the overall impression that "this is a better food."

Interestingly, according to some unnamed "market research" of shoppers who buy kosher foods, only 15% of them said they were buying them for religious reasons.  Can it really be true that 85% of the people buying kosher foods are doing so for health and food safety reasons?

This seems to reflect less on any actual known benefits of kosher food over non-kosher food, and more to do with a generalized food anxiety.  This is an odd if perfectly understandable reaction to horror stories like Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma.  The refrain we hear over and over in these exposes of the American food system are that it lacks supervision, it moves too fast for people to use proper safeguards, and that the bigger a corporation is, the less it cares about whether or not the food it produces is safe.

Given this, turning to kosher foods seems like a natural choice.  But it reminds me of a chapter in a book I recently read, where the author visits some producers of soft (unripened) cheeses in France.  In order to combat the food safety risk in unripened cheeses (which cannot be imported or sold in America), the small family farms have had to convert their farmhouse operations to huge, high tech, shiningly clean miniature cheese factories.  It gives them the same benefit as kosher food processing operations - direct involvement with the process, a more open aesthetic, and closer inspection.  Better care of the food, in other words.

I wonder how long it will take before these consumer pressures start encouraging small producers here in America to beef up their game, so to speak?  I think it's clear that people will pay extra money for food that has a greater guarantee of safety.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user joseph a