Confessions of a College Food Worker
5 March 2008 - 29 אדר א' 5768 by Huw
In the fall of 1983 I transferred to NYU from my tiny little Christian College in upstate NY. And I roomed at a Fraternity House. That fall I pledged the fraternity and then, in the spring - having passed through Hell Week - I became a member. My roommate that Spring Semester was the Fraternity President and (off the books, anyway) his girlfriend lived with us. Both of these folks, along with my boyfriend at the time, were managers in 3 different stores of one chain of very popular foodstuffs. The retail stores on Manhattan’s streets have long since closed but at the time they were as plentiful as Starbucks is now. And they were certified Kosher by the OU.
In all the stores where we were earning minimum wage - and all of us were college or high school students… but there is no way to eat healthy on minimum wage. What we did, however, was take these French Breads that we sold in the store and make sandwiches on them. At the end of the day, the breads got thrown away anyway, so we took the breads and made tasty treats like ham and cheese, roast beef, or my favourite: pepperoni and cheddar. We would run these on the baking trays through the oven to make hot, open-faced sandwiches. It didn’t dawn on me until later that, in this process, pretty much every item in all the stores was de-koshered - and thus all the food. But we never saw a Rabbi in any of our stores, anyway.
And, after a couple of years, one of the partners in the corporate offices had a wee kerfuffle with the owner of the company and went out and opened his own chain of retail. And these, too, were certified Kosher. In the early days of the store all the product was manufactured in the main store on the Upper East Side. I worked at that store. We had a lot of mistakes in the early days. We sold smoothies (although in those days they were called “fruit shakes”). One day I got food poisoning. Seems that if you leave cut fruit sitting out long enough in a NYC summer, it gets rancid. So we stopped selling fruit shakes. Then, one day, we introduced a new flavour of ice cream: Oreo Cookies and Cream. I think this was 1986?
Anyway… Kosher Trivia Hounds will see a problem here: Oreos were not certified Kosher until the mid1990s because they used lard.
I reported this to the owner of the store who totally freaked out. I assured him that, in fact, the ice cream machines, the ice cream tubs the scoops - and thus the rest of the ice cream - were now Unkosher. He never heard of such a thing. The odd thing was: the owner, as well as the person in charge of manufacturing were both Jewish. The response? change the ice cream recipe, use kosher cookies, tell no one and keep on serving! Again, this was in 1986, and all the retail stores have long been closed.
So one question is, if Gentiles (in the first instance) and uneducated Jews (in the second instance) can accidentally cause so much trouble - and then willingly cover it up: how much food is actually kosher?
But a bigger question: if your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat - without using day-old stale bread and pooling your resources with all of your co-workers… or if your company orders everyone to hush up about ethical violations, does it matter if meat and dairy never touch?
