Today, the kosher certification process is a model of good business, but it wasn't always that way. A century ago, kosher was linked more closely to violence and price-fixing than it was to Rabbinic law.

In his new book, "Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food," Albany Law School professor Timothy Lytton traces the story of kosher in the United States, from corruption to a model for food safety reform.

"People assume all health and safety standards come from the government," said Lytton, who has explored private regulation for books he wrote about gun control and the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church.

Private kosher certification, Lytton said, is a good example of how an industry is regulated without government intervention. Aside from a few mentions in the Torah that have to do with meat, the rules for kosher observance are set by Rabbinic law.

There are three categories when it comes to what's kosher and what isn't: Water, salt, vegetables, fruits, grains and fish with both fins and scales are kosher, naturally. Pork, shellfish and insects are never kosher. Bread, soup, beef, chicken and many other foods can be kosher if properly prepared. Much of that has to do with the separation of meat and dairy, which must never be mixed.

More Information

Lytton, an Orthodox Jew, keeps kosher. In accordance with Rabbinic law, his family keeps two sets of dishes — one for meat dishes and the other for cheese dishes. It's not hard to keep kosher in the Capital Region, where Lytton said 60 percent of what is on grocery store shelves is kosher-certified. And after studying the history of kosher certification, Lytton is confident a lot of care, professionalism and oversight went into the label. His faith in the label comes in part from knowing the story behind it.

In the first decades of the 20th century, corruption among Jewish meat cutters was widespread. A study done in 1925 in New York City found 40 percent of the meat sold as kosher was not kosher. Consumer groups and industry associations put the number higher, toward 60 percent. There were Jewish gangsters who mixed it up with meat cutters' unions, price-fixing scandals, threats and violence. A poultry seller who cooperated with police to expose the corruption was gunned down in Manhattan's Washington Market in a murder-for-hire paid for by a group of retail competitors, who chipped in $100 each to hire a hit man, Lytton said.

During this period of rampant fraud and corruption, government regulators tried to clean up the industry. By the late 1930s, there were six full-time kosher inspectors in the New York City Department of Markets and ten in the state Kosher Enforcement Bureau, but their numbers were insufficient to oversee the 18,000 kosher food establishments in New York City, Lytton wrote.

Reform finally came to kosher certification with the rise of a new breed of kosher overseers: private kosher certification agencies. As the demand for kosher-certified prepared and packaged foods grew in the mid-20th century, these private agencies approached major food companies to convince them that kosher certification was a low cost and highly effective marketing strategy that could earn them higher sales in key urban markets with high concentrations of observant Jews, such as New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles. As sales in these markets rose, stores placed certified items in better positions on the shelves throughout the country, increasing sales to all consumers. Once kosher certification agencies convinced the food industry of the value of kosher certification, the agencies sought to differentiate themselves from each other in order to compete for accounts, which they did by building up reputations for reliability and backing these reputations with increased management oversight and greater professionalism. According to Lytton's account, these changes made kosher certification a highly reliable system of private certification — one that serves a model for other areas of food regulation, such as food safety and nutrition labeling.

The business grew to the $12 billion industry it is today. Lytton found that of the 12 million kosher consumers, only 8 percent are religious Jews. For example, if someone with a lactose allergy is shopping for sherbet, they want to be sure the dessert wasn't made with tools also used to make a dairy treat. If a food is certified "pareve," it has touched neither meat nor dairy, so it can be eaten with either. There are 135,000 certified kosher foods in the U.S.

Marion Nestle, the author of "Food Politics," has written that the retail success of kosher is due in part to our collective anxiety about industrialization of the food supply. Lytton said kosher certification is not a substitute for rigorous food safety oversight and enforcement or for reliable private food safety auditing — a scandal in Los Angeles just prior to Passover made news when a meat seller was caught on video shot by a private investigator smuggling meat of unknown origin into the store while the kosher supervisor was away. Kosher inspectors are trained in Jewish dietary law and have a lower (zero) tolerance for contamination, particularly by bugs, than the federal government does. But they are not experts in bacterial contamination or safe food handling practices. 518-454-5352 @leighhornbeck