Foodies Get a Chance to Nosh and Dash

Naomi Silbermintz always kept kosher, and that meant never eating Campbell’s soup. Until last month, when the Sherman Oaks woman learned that the venerable American company had finally produced a soup that satisfied Judaism’s strict dietary laws.

At the first Kosher World Convention & Expo on Thursday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Silbermintz treated herself to a bowl of vegetarian vegetable, Campbell’s only kosher offering so far.

“You were dying to know what they tasted like,” she said, recalling her childhood longing for forbidden goodies. “When Oreo cookies became kosher, everybody I knew ran out and bought them.”

To exhibitor Gregory Nathanson “the kosher food industry has become just as dynamic as natural foods, and they’re beginning to cross over.”

The kosher designation has appeal beyond the observant Jewish community, he said: “It’s a way of life -- natural, healthy and identified with quality control.”

Almost 100 vendors participated in the three-day expo, which was open to the public on its final day. There were pickles, of course, Jackie Mason’s Famous Broadway Cheesecake, kosher pastrami and other items. But there were also such exotic selections as cheese enchiladas and won ton wrappers.

Kosher foods have been part of American life for 350 years, since observant Jews settled in the New World, said Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz, who advises B. Manischewitz Co. He is also founder of American Jewish Legacy, which debuted an exhibit on American kosher at the expo.

At the party after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a table of kosher refreshments was prepared for Jewish celebrants, including a spread of “soused salmon,” Horowitz said.

And many products that were favorites in English-speaking America were also pitched to new Jewish immigrants in their mother language. The exhibit includes an ad for Kellogg’s Rice Krispies urging Jewish consumers -- in Yiddish -- to listen for the cereal’s distinctive snap, crackle and pop.

Brigitte Mizrahi of Los Angeles-based Anderson International Foods was offering samples of a blue cheese that met the requirements for an especially rigorous Cholov Yisrael kosher certification. Called Danablu, the cheese is made with milk from a Danish dairy’s cows.

“We see kosher as a good niche for us,” said Peter Heide, a cheese exporter who had flown in from Denmark to attend the expo.

The dairy is small enough that a rabbi can oversee the milking of the cows, the storage of the milk and the production of the penicillium that makes the cheese blue, he said. And yet the operation is large enough to produce sufficient cheese to make a profit.

Exhibitor Nathanson offered cups of kosher wine from his Tzali’s Food and Wine Group. The company imports wines from Argentina, Australia, Chile, Italy, Israel and Spain, but none resembles the super-sweet product poured at a million Passover seders through the ages.

“The real trend in kosher wines is that the palate’s becoming much more sophisticated,” Nathanson said. “You’ve got all these people who come back into the religion” after being relatively unconcerned about the dietary laws and drinking high-quality non-kosher wines, he said, “and they bring that palate with them.”

There are actually two kinds of kosher wines, Nathanson explained. Non-mevushal wines must be produced and served by an observant Jew to remain kosher. Meshuval wines are flash-pasteurized when the grapes are being crushed. The process is a modern version of an ancient practice in which heating wine rendered it kosher. Meshuval wines remain kosher no matter who pours them.

At another display, Robinn Steiner was selling tubes of the toothpaste that her late father invented in 1977.

He called it Shane, the Hebrew word for tooth and the Yiddish word for beautiful.

Steiner recalled that she and her sister were mortified because their father would pass out samples of his toothpaste whenever they went to a restaurant. “Even my mother hated going out to dinner with him,” she said.

Exhibitors and visitors were provided with a makeshift shul where they could pray.

But they were warned to check with exhibitors before trying any samples, to make sure the foodstuffs met their own standards of what is and isn’t kosher.