Kosher Quality

Forget Screech and lobster. Kosher wine and gefilte fish are Newfoundland's hot new exports.

“Over-Gefilte-Fishing Sparks Greenpeace Cry for Gefilte-Fishing Moratorium” is the fairly hilarious headline on a fake news story I read recently, the joke being that gefilte fish is not a fish but in fact a traditional Jewish “delicacy” fashioned from chopped pickled carp covered in aspic and studded with boiled carrot. (Think of it as a cod cake in a yarmulke.) I recall this joke as I drive toward Fair Haven, Newfoundland, on a sunny spring afternoon, where everywhere I look there’s nothing but marble-blue ponds and rolling hills that will eventually tumble into the great Atlantic. I remember this joke because not only am I driving through the land of fish moratoriums, but I’m also headed toward Neptune Sea Products – Atlantic Canada’s only kosher-sanctioned secondary fish-processing plant, with a pit stop at the country’s only kosher winery.

Here in cod’s land, Bond Rideout Jr. leads me on a tour of his kosher processing plant, bought just a year ago, with gleaming white walls, concrete floors, high ceilings and stainless-steel everything else. I see hundreds of capelin, the tiny iridescent fish that start rolling into nearby coves during springtime, smoked and resting on racks.

“There’s no question that kosher is growing,” Rabbi Chaim Goldberg tells me over the phone from New York, in a voice that’s a cross between Jackie Mason and my cousin Irv. Goldberg is a Rabbinic Coordinator at the non-profit Orthodox Union (OU), the authority that, among other things, stages surprise inspections of kosher-certified institutions to make sure that everything’s, well, kosher. “As the world is getting more global, manufacturers in places that have never seen a Jew before, and may never see a Jew, see kosher as a very easy way to market their product.”

It’s a US$14-billion-a-year business in North America, say the reps at Manischewitz, the king of the kosher brands.

Newfoundland’s Neptune has secured a bissel of that kashruth pie by producing some 200 different products, from wasabi salmon to Cajun cod. Rideout figures Neptune Sea Products’ sales will top $2-million this year.

Typically, people have their own ideas of what kosher means, with “healthy,” “clean” and “pure” being common descriptors. While the A-okay from a mashgiach – the specially trained kosher inspector – has more to do with complex Talmudic and biblical laws than idyllic coastal scenes, even the non-observant perceive the OU symbol as a standard of excellence.