From Snout to Tail, a 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig
13th October 2024
In 2021, the Orthodox Union declined to put its kosher certification on Impossible Pork, even though similarly vegan “Impossible” foods — its burger, its chicken nuggets — carried the OU seal of approval.
“The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an ‘OU’ to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, told JTA at the time. “It may indeed be completely [kosher] in terms of its ingredients: If it’s completely plant-derived, it’s kosher. Just in terms of sensitivities to the consumer … it didn’t get it.”
It’s a delicate phrase, “sensitivities to the consumer,” that hints at a long and fraught history explored in Jordan D. Rosenblum’s new book, “Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig.” The “consumer” of course is the Jew, and those “sensitivities” are the result of a history that turned the pig not just into the ne plus ultra of the taboo, or treyf, in Judaism, but, as the symbol of what Jews do and don’t do, an inadvertent marker of Judaism itself.