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January 2, 2004/Tevet 8 5764, Vol. 56, No. 15
Butchers: kosher beef disease-free
JOE BERKOFSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - New signs spice up the meat section of the Hungarian Kosher Grocery in Skokie, Ill., one of the nation's largest kosher food super-markets.
They reassure customers that, in light of the recent scare and media hoopla over mad cow disease, kosher beef is safer than non-kosher meat.
"Some people are paranoid. You tell them something on television, and they think that's the way it is," says Sandor Kirsche, the super-market's owner.
Kirsche posted the placards in response to customer inquiries about meat safety following the reports of mad cow disease in the United States a week ago.
Kosher food wholesalers and retailers, as well as top kosher-certification agencies, agree with Kirsche's assessment that kosher beef is much less likely to be infected with mad cow than non-kosher cuts.
Kosher food industry sources say that a combination of safeguards - ranging from traditional kosher slaughter-ing practices to beef-purchasing policies - make kosher beef safer.
Menachem Lubinsky, presi-dent of Integrated Marketing Communications, which produces the annual Kosher-fest trade show, says he expects that the mad cow scare will boost sales of kosher beef the way several outbreaks of salmonella in the past few years sent kosher poultry profits soaring.
Still, industry sources caution that kosher meat isn't immune to contamination with mad cow disease.
"I don't want to overstate the case. Some of the procedures related to kosher mitigate against MCD, but there are no guarantees," says Rabbi Menachem Genack, rabbinic administrator of the Orthodox Union's kashrut division.
His comment came after the union and Star-K, another major international kosher-certification agency, issued statements seeking to reassure consumers about mad cow.
Those reassurances came after a Holstein cow imported along with dozens of other cows from Canada tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a fatal brain-wasting disease similar to the human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.
U.S. officials say tough new measures against mad cow protect the domestic feed supply and that the U.S. beef supply remains safe.
Kosher food experts main-tain that there is every reason to believe people should have no beef about eating kosher meat.
While some of the dozen kosher slaughterhouses in the country buy their cattle at the same auctions that supply non-kosher producers, a shochet, or ritual slaughterer, would never accept a visibly sick cow such as the infected bull found in Washington, industry insiders say.
"An animal that is a 'downer' - that cannot walk to the slaughtering place on its own - would not be used," says Rabbi Avrom Pollack, presi-dent of the Baltimore-based Star-K.
If the animal were sick, it could not be considered kosher.
Kosher slaughterhouses also typically use younger cows - between 18-24 months old - while the diseased cow in Washington is believed to be 6 1/2 years old.
Kosher slaughter also pro-hibits shooting or stunning cows in the head, "which may cause brain matter, where the disease resides, to be scattered to other parts of the body," the O.U.'s Genack says.
Kosher slaughter mandates that the animal's throat be slit, and potentially contaminated blood is drained away from the carcass, he says.
These kashrut experts and others also say that about 50 non-kosher slaughterhouses use a machine called the Advanced Meat Recovery System, which scrapes every bit of meat from a carcass - including from areas near the brain and spinal column where BSE could reside - and some scraps go into packaged ground meat.
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