copyright © 2015 Mordechai Schmutter
Reprinted with permission of the author
The kosher food industry keeps getting bigger and bigger, no offense. There are new products coming out every day, and it’s hard to keep up. How does your store know that, for example, there’s a new kind of pareve corn dog? (They’re pareve because they’re not made out of real dog.) How does your school know that there’s been yet another attempt to make peanut butter without peanuts? (We’ve had it for years. It’s called butter.) How does your nursing home know there is a new kind of chocolate with pop rocks in it?
Enter Kosherfest. Kosherfest is the world’s largest and only kosher trade show (that I know of). You walk around for two days, and they give out samples. It’s like a marathon, but instead of water, they hand you food. It’s the least healthy marathon ever. (A couple of booths were giving out water, though. I got a bottle with 4 hashgachos on it.)
And there’s a huge variety of random booths, so you get to taste foods and in weird combinations. For example, there was one booth for a company that sold tea, and every time I passed it, the people manning the booth were drinking their tea. That’s what they did all day. I don’t even think they went home that night – I think they just stayed straight through to the next day.
So on the second day, I was walking down the aisle eating an ice pop, when suddenly the tea guy popped out of his booth (he was wired on tea) and handed me a cup.
“Drink this!” he said, “It’s really good!”
Well, I’m not going to stop eating ice cream to drink tea, because I’m basically a six-year-old. There is no tea that’s better than ice cream.
But he just stood there, waiting for my approval. So I said, “I’m eating ice cream. The tea isn’t going to taste right.” On the other hand, seeing as my mouth was cold from the ice cream, the hot tea probably couldn’t hurt. So I took a sip and I couldn’t taste anything.
“It’s really good!” I said.
“I know!” he said. And he hopped away to go ply people with more tea.
But I do go every year, as press, to find out what the new products are, and then I eat them. I also write about them, but seeing me walk around Kosherfest, with ice cream in one hand and tea in the other, you could not guess that that is anywhere near my main priority.
One big trend this year seemed to be travel foods. Travel food is very important, because people don’t have time for anything. That’s why we need products like the new EZ-Prep Gefilte Fish, made by a company called “The Heimishe Fisherman”. Because normally gefilte fish is so hard to prep. Why are we so spoiled? In the old days, they had to grind the ingredients from scratch. Whereas I don’t even know what the ingredients are. I’m too lazy to just read the back of the package.
But according to their press materials, with EZ-Prep Gefilte Fish, you just pop it in hot water!
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “How is that different from regular gefilte fish?” According to the company spokesman, it’s different in that you don’t need to add seasonings.
Wait. We were supposed to add seasonings?
I’ve never once done that. I don’t really taste the difference between seasoned gefilte fish covered in carrots, chrain, mayonnaise, hot peppers, onion dip, and cole slaw, and unseasoned gefilte fish covered in carrots, chrain, mayonnaise, hot peppers, onion dip, and cole slaw. Maybe I should put down the ice pop.
There’s also no point in adding seasoning to this fish, because the package locks in the flavor, seeing that it’s actually a heavy plastic tube that looks like kishke. So it’s important, during the “easy prep”, to make sure you’re paying attention and not mix things up, because otherwise you’re going to have some really awkward cholent.
So for example, one travel food that just came out is canned chicken. This way, if you’re travelling, you just need to bring along a can of chicken, plus a can opener. Also, you’re going to need to invest in a fleishig can opener.
I’m also not sure if you’re supposed to then strain out the liquid, or if the liquid is basically chicken soup. Maybe you only strain tuna because it’s tuna soup. But now you can have chicken on the road! (Insert your chicken-on-the-road jokes here.) It also makes an awesome addition to a sad single guy’s Shabbos. You got your can of tuna, your can of chicken, a tube of travel mayonnaise, and you’re good to go. All you need is canned cholent.
And once you’re travelling, there’s now a company called Koshwhere, which can ensure that you get kosher food delivered anywhere in the world, as long as you arrange it beforehand. So basically, if you’re ever going anywhere where you’re not sure if there’s going to be food – your kid’s graduation, teacher conferences, early morning shiurim – you can have food delivered, and then you can sit there pigging out and have everyone around you going, “Is that canned chicken? It smells like tuna.”
And it’s now easier to carry snacks around as well. One company came out with “Popella”, which is a tiny popcorn that they did not create by scraping the bottoms of the bags of regular popcorn. I think they’re using baby corn. But according to the packaging, this is a separate, “ancient” species of popcorn that, in addition to being tiny, has a disintegrating outer hull that doesn’t get stuck in your teeth.
According to press materials (That’s me!): “You don’t have to worry about hulls stuck between your teeth!” Because this is a worry that I had. Sometimes I’d stay up nights.
Anyway, this species was discovered in the 1850s and it grows in ears of corn that are 3-4 inches tall. Not only does that makes for simpler corn mazes, but the popcorn itself is adorable. It’s like popcorn for babies!
NOTE: Do not feed popcorn to babies. Let the babies find it themselves, when they crawl around under the table.
Point is, you don’t have to schlep around regular HUGE popcorn and a toothpick, because you can just take along tiny popcorn. It’s also easier to sneak into spectator events, such as brissim. And you can throw it at aufrufs and it doesn’t hurt as much as regular popcorn. And nothing will get stuck in the chosson’s teeth, which could be horrible for wedding photos.
In fact, all snack foods were big this year. For example, one company came out with kale chips, which is somehow possible, even though kale is a lettuce. This way, you can hate your life even when you’re snacking.
On the other end of the spectrum, there were companies that specialize in covering pretzels in chocolate. The pretzels come in all colors – pink for a baby girl, blue for a baby boy, yellow if you missed the shul announcement as to what the person had.
Dairy was also big this year. When I was growing up, if someone told you he ate cholov yisroel, you kind of felt sorry for him, because it meant that he’d never tasted good chocolate. Or good ice cream. Or fresh milk, for some reason.
But no longer. We even have Greek yogurts that are somehow also Cholov Yisroel, manufactured by several companies with nice, Greek-sounding names, such as “Norman”. Each yogurt company also makes a kids’ yogurt, though I cannot taste the difference. Except for the one where you pour in fruity pebbles. So apparently, we’ve forgiven the Greeks for what they did to us. As long as they don’t make a “black olive” flavor.
But not everyone has forgiven them. There were also several cheese companies whose names were some variation of the word “Macabbee”. The Maccabee brands work with cheese, though, because that’s how you defeat the Greeks – offer them free samples of cheese, then wine, then cut off their heads.
But not everyone was advertising milchigs. There was also a company advertising non-dairy cookies, like that’s a new concept, (Pareve cookies! What will they think of next?) and they’re made with soy milk. I don’t really eat soy, unless it’s hiding in something else, because I don’t understand it. Soy beans are green, but soy sauce is black and soy milk is white.
And speaking of fake foods, there was a company that sells brownies that are 40% beans. Talk about an awkward cholent.
But by far, the best thing I ate at the show was squab, which I had to look up. Apparently, a squab is a baby pigeon. They culinary world calls it “squab” because the word squab sounds exotic, like something you get on your shoe. There’s actually nothing wrong with eating pigeon, though. If you live in a culture that doesn’t eat pigeons, like ours, you have an overpopulation where everywhere you look, they’re hanging out in droves and eating garbage directly over your car. So squab is also perfect on the go, because you can get squab basically anywhere, as long as you always fly with your shochet knife. Before we know it, we’ll be eating it in cans.
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