"We answer to a higher authority" was the novel ad for kosher hot dogs run by Hebrew National way back when in 1972. The ad was meant to give the impression that kosher food, specifically the hot dogs being advertised, were higher quality than those of the non-kosher variety.

And, as the New York Times reports, clearly Americans have responded, with the numbers showing that so much kosher food is sold today in the United States that clearly the percentage of consumers being Jewish, let alone Orthodox who care about kashrut, is very small and most consumers of kosher food are non-Jews (see NYT for the numbers). Clearly many people see the kosher symbol and respond positively.

I even remember, in the days before glatt was the standard, that Orthodox Jews also ate Hebrew National. It only stopped when glatt started becoming more and more of a standard..

Anyway, one thing about the New York Times article made me uncomfortable. The Times writes:

Americans eat more hot dogs than any nation on earth — 20 billion of them every year, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, 150 million of them on the Fourth of July alone. Making kosher hot dogs ubiquitous would be, like getting rid of university quotas and restricted country clubs, a powerful statement that Jews have made it.

The struggle, not surprisingly, has played out on the ball fields. Observant Jewish sports fans, long used to brown-bagging it or watching the games hungry, have cheered every time another stadium has said yes to a kosher food concession. Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards started serving kosher fare in 1993; New York’s Shea and Yankee Stadiums joined the ranks in 1998.

It’s not just hot dogs. Every time a major American food product goes kosher, observant Jews are delighted. Coca-Cola in 1935. Oreos in 1997. Tootsie Rolls last year and two Gatorade drinks earlier this year. Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Smucker’s grape jam, Tropicana orange juice — every new item brought into the kosher pantry is a sign of fitting in the American mainstream while being observant.

From the NYT article it seems to me that we are way too caught up in our food... I love good food as much as, or more than, the next guy, but the way they write it just seems like perhaps we are focused way too much on such trivialities. While it is clearly a blessing to live in such times that keeping kosher is so easy and there is such a wide range of kosher foods accessible, it still feels, from the way they write it, that we are too focused on it.