Kosher Pork, A Queens Lunch Special
(photo taken by Oded Hirsch, published by New Yorker)
For a brief few hours today, OU-certified pork was available for sale in Queens. You would have had to be quick to enjoy the guilt-free break from normal kosher dietary law, but the artist Oded Hirsch was in the right place at the right time.
Philip Gourevitch blogged in the New Yorker about the embarrassing mistake at the Associated Supermarket in Sunnyside, Queens that was brought to his attention by Hirsch. Gourevitch called the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certification agency whose reputation was on the line, and he spoke to Howard Katzenstein:
But seriously, Katzenstein told me, he hears of such outrages only “rarely.” “Computer-generated labels,” he said, “they’re a nightmare waiting to happen.” The last two words of the stamp on the pork in Queens, “Beit Yusef,” mean “according to Sephardic custom,” said Katzenstein, an Ashkenazi Jew. “But I don’t think even the Sephardim would accept that.”
