Thursday, March 12, 2009

Kosher Food Costs Solutions from "America's Rabbi". Maybe Not as Simple as He Thinks

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, ("America's Rabbi" - his words, not mine. Really. See for yourself.) writes and speaks a lot. Perhaps too much. (To be honest, I'm not sure of the value of airing our dirty laundry in the Huffington Post, but you gotta pay the bills somehow, I guess.) You see, sometimes it becomes hard to keep up with an impossible publication schedule. So you - he - seems to write things that on paper or screen sound good, but don't make much sense.
To wit, Rabbi Boteach complained recently about the high cost of Jewish life and the fact that Jewish young men (and old men) are pigs. Aside from being two columns in one, Rabbi Boteach makes several assertions about potential ways to lower the costs of Jewish food which I find speculative, to say the least. He writes:

A national campaign should be launched to make Kosher food mainstream for Jew and non-Jew alike. Already studies show that approximately twenty percent of Americans buy food with kosher symbols because of the high food quality. Doubling that number would create an economy of scale which would vastly decrease the costs.
I wonder whether Rabbi Boteach has any knowledge of the kosher industry. "Make kosher food mainstream"? Has he ever heard of Cheerios, or Heinz Ketchup, or any of the other hundreds of thousands of products that boast kashrut supervision. Let's face it: the greatest difference in expense of kosher food comes essentially from meat, poultry and cheese. Does Rabbi Boteach seriously think that the American consumer will suddenly willingly pay significantly more for a piece of meat? And even if he did succeed in creating a real "national" kosher brand, it would still cost a great, great deal more than non-kosher meat, which does not require the shechitah, supervision, salting, watching - all the elements of kosher meat and poultry production that really do cost a lot of money. He continues:

The same applies to kosher restaurants. Imagine a national kosher restaurant chain that markets itself to the mainstream public, available everywhere, and accomplishing two important goals. First, the dramatic reduction of costs through millions more customers and second, achieving the widespread availability of kosher food so that kosher travelers need not starve. If, say, a national organic Kosher food chain would open, many non-Jews who currently avoid fast food because its unhealthy may well flock to it because of high food quality.

Here Rabbi Boteach plays into the worst of stereotypes, that kosher food is better because it's higher quality food. Baloney. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kosher french fries are still fattening. Kosher hamburgers will still clog your arteries. The fact that a restaurant is kosher has no relationship to its cleanliness, healthful food production, quality, or any other standard. (And if you've been in the back of any kosher fast-food joint, you'd know what I mean.) McDonalds is probably much, much cleaner.
But Rabbi Boteach assertion that a national food chain of kosher stores would lower costs also defies logic. Would these restaurants have hashgachah? Would they serve kosher meat? Would they close for Shabbat? Anyone in the restaurant business will tell you that Friday night is the most important restaurant night of the week. Imagine opening a business that must remain closed on the biggest money-making day each and every week, and you'll begin to understand why kosher restaurant food costs so much more. The owner doesn't get a cut in rent. He just has to make up his Shabbat losses throughout the rest of the week - no matter how big the chain might be. So as much as Rabbi Boteach wants us to believe that "nationalization" would save us money, I truly doubt it.
The only way to create national brands of kosher foods and restaurants is to have a sufficient market that demands it. Without the market forces, building businesses based on complaints and ideals will only lose investors a great deal of money.
One other thing: a national food market already does exist. There is a place with national kosher food chains that offer readily available kosher food, meat, cheese, wine - you name it. This place also boasts national kosher restaurant chains and smaller kosher stores, shops and eateries, open and available across the country.
We call it Israel.

1 comment:

  1. Whoa - you completely missed his other insane points! He actually makes five points:

    1. Support vouchers to lower day school tuition. Nice idea, completely impractical on any level. Hey, I support vouchers and school choice, but there are so many problems with this I don't know where to start. Extending vouchers to private religious schools is iffy law - even if only covering secular subjects - and almost certain to generate powerful political opposition. But even in a fantasy world where this is passed, where's the funding for the vouchers coming from? Education funding is largely local, not federal. So your local property taxes would go up to pay for the vouchers. I suppose that In mixed neighborhoods, that would spread out the costs somewhat for large families who live in neighborhood without a lot of other large families, but it's no panacea even in a fantasy world where it could happen in the first place.

    2. Make kosher food "mainstream." Yeah, you nailed it. Kosher food IS mainstream. Even kosher meat is somewhat mainstream: I've never been to a ballpark that didn't serve "kosher hot dogs." Oh, you want glatt kosher with kashering and certification good enough to actually eat these "kosher" dogs? Er, that will cost you. There are actually kosher restaurants where the food costs about the same as non-kosher food: in Manhattan, where food isn't the #1 expense, it's rent.

    3. Rabbis should institute communal norms of acceptable spending on celebrations. I agree with this one, and it's been implemented in some closed communities with varying degrees of success. But if the economic downturn continues, this will fix itself. And it's more of a herd stupidity thing anyway: if you can't afford it, don't do it!

    4. "A moratorium on capital projects." Sounds good in principle, but what happens when the shul building is falling apart or inadequate (our shul's main room is on the second floor, but there's no elevator, so if you can't climb stairs, you can't daven), or the mikvah can handle 10 women a night when there are 80 women who need to dunk (hey, that sounds like our mikvah), or there are six Kindergarten classes and only four classrooms (the case in my kids' school)? So, yeah, I'm paying three new building funds, and there's probably some waste in there somewhere, but some of these problems have been pushed off for a decade already. Focusing on tuition/dues reduction makes sense, but a moratorium?

    5. "Jewish values that pertain to dating and marriage should be mandatory in all Jewish schools and Synagogues." I'm pretty sure that it is mandatory, but the problem seems to be a supply/demand imbalance, so you can teach respect and the value of inner beauty all day long, but it's not going to have an impact. Let's ignore that bad behavior is reinforced by popular culture and some of the male focus on looks may be innate. As long as it's socially acceptable for men to get married any time throughout their 20's, while a 21 year old single girl is approaching her "sell-by" date, you have a supply/demand imbalance, and you're going to have egregious male behavior. If the social norms were reversed, you'd have a male shidduch crisis. So instead of teaching that beauty is within, maybe the thing is to teach that 29 year old single women are HOT!

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