In short, I’m afraid not. This has been bugging me for ages, and as soon as I can be bothered, I’ll put in some references. Perhaps it intrigues me because supermarket food is so mega bland and I’m always looking at kosher product as premium product. Hey kosher chickens from the Balaclava Safeway are mega fat and damned tasty - real tasty.

Organic food in much the same light. Both massively expensive, and to some extent, both are approved by the ministry of good intentions and nothing more. As with everything, kosher is way bigger in America. In Melbourne, unless you’re in Caufield, you will struggle to find anything more than bagels, matzoh or pickled gefilte fish. Meh, what can you do.

But our question is, is kosher food actually organic? No. Because religious doctrine written thousands of years ago could predict cheeseburgers being really unhealthy, but not petroleum based pesticides being used in agriculture on a colossal scale. And when the chemicals came, did they revise their doctrine? No chance.

The only thing with vegetables in kosher I could find was that they must be free of bugs. So in theory you could get tomatoes form Chernobyl and they’d be kosher. No wucken furries. Well what about the meat? From my skimpy research (and I welcome any feedback/corrections on the subject. I’m by no means authoritative on the subject). Again you could feed cows McCrap burgers and it could still be potentially kosher. There’s absolutely nothing I could find to say you couldn’t feed animals feed based on chemicals. Only how the beast is killed, the blood is drained and meat treated with salt.

Even more interesting is that in the US, kosher is considered such a high standard, in many states kosher meat packing plants aren’t subject to food standard inspections. Anecdotally, people have said how kosher places have gone out of business because word got out about how filthy their meat preparation facilities were. Thankfully, it would seem that the Jewish community is so small in Australia that a dodgy kosher butcher wouldn’t last long. Whether the same law exemptions apply in Australia, sorry no idea.

Anyways, if there was any motto to this story it’s that buy food based on quality, not dogma. If the kosher product is good and worth the money, good. Same with the organic. But unless you’re fervent in your beliefs, it’s best to mix and match to get the best quality food.

Oh yeah, and if peacenik organic types are so preoccupied with saving the planet one vegetable at a time, why the hell are they always wrapped in so much shitty plastic…