You know you had a good time if your stomach hurts

By Michael Orbach

Native Americans have vision quests, college fraternities have hazing, and Jewish reporters have Kosherfest as their rite of initiation. The annual two-day festival highlighting the newest kosher products was held on October 27-28 at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. Before the big day my colleagues gave me strict instructions: wear large pants, don’t bother with a belt and the more pockets the better. Skip dinner the night before, don’t eat breakfast, and if it looks edible, it probably is (or if it’s not, poison control has a booth somewhere at Kosherfest.)

I met up with two old friends before the event: Zechariah Mehler and Shalom Silbermintz, hosts of the Dead Air program on Yeshiva University’s radio station, WYUR, and seven-year Kosherfest veterans. They were there to record a radio program about the event, but there was no question about the true nature of our mission: Free food. Lots of it.

Only Christians believe gluttony is a sin.

Security was tight and while we waited on line Zechariah and Shalom complained about last year’s main attraction: the smashing of the Guinness Book’s World Record for the largest peanut butter sandwich.

“It wasn’t even peanut butter,” Zechariah lamented. “It was soy butter, and it wasn’t even the largest peanut butter sandwich. It was lots of little pieces of bread stuck together.”

“Seriously, I’ve lost faith in records kept by a beer company,” Shalom added.

Curiously, a security guard waved through members of the press without wanding us, even though we each seemed to be carrying enough electronics to make a metal detector sing Puccini. Once inside the hall, Zechariah developed the kind of plan we’d need.

“We go, we eat. I, in an attempt to have something to discuss for tonight’s broadcast, will eat everything,” he pledged.

I, with a somewhat sensitive stomach, pledged to watch him and pump his stomach if the situation demanded it. We began, as one should at Kosherfest, with a hearty breakfast: free iced coffee and juice from the Prigat stand, and free bagels, English muffins, and doughnuts. One booth over a variety of spreads was on display; our stomachs growled in what would be the soundtrack to Kosherfest.

Last year, Shalom explained, was the Year of the Cheese at Kosherfest. This year there were slimmer pickings; a good spicy Pepper jack cheese by the Toobroo booth and a block of Parmesan cheese by Schtark Cheeses. This year could have been titled the Year of the Lawsuit. Rubashkin’s booth was noticeably absent; Toobroo is currently embroiled in a battle over their newly acquired plant in Ogdensburg with the plant’s former owners, Ahava. With the exception of two kinds of kosher beef jerky (R.J.’s Kosher Beef Jerky and Holy Cow Kosher Beef Jerky) meat at Kosherfest was in short supply. In a telling sign about the kosher meat market, a three-way competition for best deli sandwich, in which Traditions of Central Avenue was a local favorite, the winner was a fancy egg salad sandwich from Manhattan.

Highlights of the festival included Cedarhurst-based Kosher.com’s giant shopping cart. It was equipped with a powerful looking V-8 engine, although a spokesperson for the company declined to comment on the cart’s top speed.

“It’s a shopping cart on steroids,” said Kosher.com CEO Aaron Dobrinsky.

Pomegranate juice from Organic Juice USA, an imported line of sugar-free fruit juices from Turkey, put the overly expensive Pom juice to shame. Brain Toniq, a high-end brain energy drink won Best-in-Product-Design. Glatech’s Kolatin, the first kosher gelatin, uses animal hide to produce a completely pareve gelatin and relies on a teshuva from Rav Moshe zt”l. Lucky Chen, an entirely decent instant Chinese noodle product won Best-in-Show, though it lost points (at least by my informal reckoning) for hiring stereotypically Asian women to hawk the wares. Illinois Nut and Candy received favorable reviews for its Kosher-for-Passover Ten Plagues chocolates, though it too lost points when the salesgirl didn’t know all ten plagues by heart.

“Bernie Madoff?” she asked.

There were a number of festival low points: The girl dressed as a leprechaun giving out free pastries (“Would you like a rugaluck?” she asked); the Dagim fisherman who’s been carrying the same net for the last seven years, at least according to Zechariah (we were half hoping one of the giant jellyfish candies would eat him); the lack of bathrooms; and the kosher candy display that didn’t give out samples; XL, a Polish energy drink (when asked what sets their product apart from their competitors, the salesman replied, “We’re cheap. And kosher.”) Ironically, according to the free Kashruth magazine given out at the event, XL is not actually kosher. The Westboro Baptist Church also made an appearance, protesting outside the convention center — though important to note, they were not as irritating as some of the mascots.

If Kosherfest is any indication — and it is — it seems that kosher is going gourmet. Merchants seemed to be showing higher-end good, or higher end merchants showed newly minted kosher certifications, since it doesn’t hurt and, given the large size of the kosher market, it can definitely help. For better or worse, some of the heimishe is being taken out of kosher.

As for us, I lost my colleagues while they discussed a pitch for a Jewish television travel channel. A pretty girl from Lawrence smiled at me and handed me a lollipop from Custom Candy Concepts, a company that produces edible art candies with personalized messages. I put it in my pocket. I wasn’t exactly hungry.