Holy brisket breaks the bank

Pearl's Kitchen is excited to be serving up some grub at the upcoming Purim festival at the San Francisco JCC on February 28th. We're bringing our top game to this event (not that we don't always serve our best) because this is the ultimate test-- serving grandma's food to other Jewish grandmas, their children, and their grandchildren. In preparation I've been perfecting my chicken soup with matzoh balls and Jon's been fine tuning his corned beef. And then we got the not surprising question: is your meat Kosher?


Ok well, the chicken soup is no problem. Up until now I've been using organic chicken in my soup, but I can easily replace that with kosher chicken which is readily available and not too pricey. The corned beef on the other hand is another story.

We've been investigating different brisket retailers since the beginning of this endeavor. We really liked the product from Robert's Corned Meats which is a locally owned business that's been selling corned beef briskets in SF for 100 years. We have looked into very local producers like Marin Sun Farms, which sells all grass fed beef raised fifty miles away and bigger gourmet producers like Golden Gate Meats, which ship from Montana but the meat has no antibiotics or growth hormones. Of course prices range dramatically and justifiably depending on the size of the production and usually the sustainability of the practices. But nothing could have prepared us for the price jump when we looked into kosher briskets.

 Kosher is a certification which ensures that the animal and its meat have been prepared according to Jewish law. It must be killed in a humane way (by hand) and it's blood must be quickly drained from its body. If an animal is sick or dies of natural causes it cannot be Kosher. As an aside, even the grand old USDA does not allow "downer" or sick cows to enter the food supply, but it still happens all the time. Similarly to foods labeled organic, there seems to be an assumption that Kosher means the meat is healthier or at least more ethical. The validity of this is a whole different debate which I won't get into here, but one thing I do know is that Kosher means expensive!

Take this family's story from an article in Money Magazine:

It's not just the $9 grape juice doing damage to the Perets budget. The kosher mozzarella that Abbi uses to make pizza costs $5, double the price of the non-kosher kind; brisket, the quintessential Jewish comfort food, costs a whopping $14.99 a pound vs. $1.99. It all adds up to a monthly grocery bill of more than $1,000 for Abbi, 33, Guy, 36, and their four kids, ages 3 to 9 (a fifth is due in July).

I'm familiar with the reasons that grass fed local beef or even just regular old organic beef is more expensive than your average corn fed beef shipped from a factory farm in the Midwest. I read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma. I get the whole negative externality thing- that the price of industrial food is deceptively low because its costs are being born out by the environment, our health, and the poor treatment of the animals and the people who process them. But I've never really thought about Kosher meat before and today I found out that a pound of Kosher brisket is twice as expensive as a pound of the holy grail of sustainable beef at Marin Sun Farms!

So here are some possible explanations:

1. The Kosher market is relatively small and so there is not the economy of scale necessary to drive prices down.
2. The butchering and handling of the meat must be done by someone who is highly skilled and therefore charges more.
3. There are less plants producing Kosher meat so if one gets busted for doing something wrong, prices go through the roof.
4. People are so willing to pay for Kosher food because it is a necessity for them that the few producers that do exist are able to dictate higher prices.

While we may never get to the bottom of the Authentic vs. Sustainable debate, likewise we may never know whether Kosher is really worth the premium price. Here at Pearl's Kitchen we will continue to examine all of the available sources of meat and promise to serve food that we feel good about.