Kudos to the Manchester Beit Din
From across the pond, (hat tip)
England – Kellogg’s has apologised to a Jewish man who ate a cereal bar containing pork gelatine because its wrapper incorrectly stated it was suitable for vegetarians.
Oberon Gardner and his family bought the Rice Krispies Squares bars at a supermarket in Colchester, Essex. Labels on 5,000 multipacks carried the words “suitable for vegetarians”, even though the full ingredients list explained that around one per cent of the marshmallow bar contained pork gelatine.
It was only later that 21-year-old Mr Gardner inspected the individual wrapper more carefully. “After my sister ate one bar and I took a bite of mine, it occurred to me that I had never seen any marshmallow without some form of gelatine in,” he said. “I decided before I ate any more to see what was substituted in its place. I was absolutely disgusted to find that the ingredients list stated it had pork gelatine in it.
I like the response of the Manchester Beit Din. (emphasis mine)
The company also contacted the Manchester Beth Din in an attempt to understand the implications of the incorrect labelling. A spokesman for the Beth Din said: “At no time did Kellogg’s portray the product as kosher – and any consumer worried about their consumption of kosher food should not buy items which only state ‘suitable for vegetarians’. “They should look for a kosher logo on the packaging or take guidance from the correct kosher authorities.”
While I happen to be of the opinion that in America one can rely upon the ingredients listed on the package most of the time, a topic for another post, I think that the Manchester Beit Din took the correct attitude. Kellogs never said that it was kosher, so why should any Jewish organization get involved. This is a different approach than that taken by a number of Jewish organizations a few ago when it turned out that McDonalds, while correct in saying that it was frying their french fries in vegetable oil, was flavoring them with beef tallow. See here for extensive documentation of the case. The Jewish organizations that received part of the $10 million settlement were,
* Jewish Community Centers Association, $200,000;
* Star-K/Torah.Org, $300,000;
* Orthodox Union, $150,000;
* The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life (Hillel), $300,000.
* CLAL, $50,000;
While these are all very worthwhile Jewish non-profits, and the money probably went to important programs, and $10 million for McDonalds is not very much, McDonalds never said that their food is kosher. Let’s make a trade, Americans stop suing as often as they do and maybe learn from the British, at least in this type of case, and the British maybe learn to loosen their libel laws a bit in order to promote investigative journalism and some more freedom of speech.
October 12th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
There is distniction between a legal and moral analysis of a buisiness practice. While the package was not advertised as kosher, it was misleading and led someone to a severe transgression ( this 1% is probably not botel for several reasons). The community is correct to make it their issue since its members suffer from misleading advertising no less than others.
Relying on an ingredients list is also bad public policy, in my opinion. Of course, sometimes you can be pretty sure that a product is kosher based on the ingredients, and other times it is a crap shoot. One must know Yore Deah well and have a great deal of technical knowledge to decide these issues. Without hearing your reasoning, and I would love to hear it, a comminity cannot live a standard so undefined as to be decided by each individual without training or learning. Something is either kosher or not, and that is what the average person needs to hear.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
The packaging was definitely misleading, and if this didn’t happen so often in America there would be no need for all of those “kosher alerts.” Also, the ingredients DID list pork gelatin. Bli neder I’ll get around sometime in the future to writing a post about hashgahah.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
MM,
While I generally disagree with “reading ingredients” since I don’t think most folks can intelligently decide whether “red dye #4″ or “monogamatate hydrosulfide” is kosher, I think you hit the nail on the head with your larger point. Why was this guy eating something without a hashgacha and then complaining about it? Kudos to Kelloggs for reacting appropriately (since it did say, ‘suitable for veg-bo’s” most of whom would not eat something like that. And yes, kudos to the B”D for saying “Kelloggs did nothing wrong by us.”
And I wasn’t aware that Jewish orgs got money over the beef tallow law suit. I thought the plaintiff in that suit was a Hindu? Why are Jews getting money???
October 13th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
There are definitely some problems with certain ingredients, although I think that all of those dies, etc., as long as they aren’t there for taste aren’t a problem. The person wasn’t upset b/c they weren’t kosher, he was a vegetarian who was upset at having eaten pork/meat. If you look at the settlement of the McDonald’s suit, part of it was that they would give money to certain organizations, one of the possibilities was for the organization to be involved with kosher education. The suit was brought by Hindus and most of the info I found was from Hindu web sites. Kelloggs reacted fine. They made a mistake and fixed it. By the constant “kashrut alerts” being sent out by the O-U, O-K, etc., there are plenty of mistakes in American food labeling.