April 20, 2011--Kosher Quinoa

I'm having a problem with Passover. Not the holiday or the way we celebrated it two nights ago with my 103-year-old mother, but with what the rabbis are saying about Quinoa. That rich-in-protein pseudo-cereal, which is a favorite of mine.

Though it resembles grain, and thus could be susceptible to leavening (a Passover no-no), since it is merely grain-like, it should be approved for eating during the week of Pesach. But as with many of these kinds of things, there is controversy. Of the on-the-one-hand-but on-the-other-hand variety.

Here are some of the issues as outlined in the linked article from the New York Times:

Quinoa is native to Peru and, along with the potato and maize, was an Inca staple for millennia. And though in recent years it has become popular among health food enthusiasts--it is cooked much like rice and serves nicely as a substitute for it as well as cous-cous--is still grown in the Andean region, mainly in Bolivia.

Since it is from a remote area, the Orthodox Union (the group that when it comes to kosher laws is the gold standard) cannot easily get to the fields to check out how it is cultivated, harvested, and most important shipped.

Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, director of the kosher supervision service of the Chicago Rabbinical Council, points out that to get to the Bolivian quinoa farms requires a "four-day trek into the wilderness." So neither he nor anyone else in his line of work can verify that quinoa in not shipped here in containers or bags or boxes that also might have been used for the harvesting and shipping of wheat.

Because, according to the strictest kosher laws, even one grain of wheat in a truckload of quinoa would render all of the quinoa not kosher for Passover. In Yiddish, chometz.

Most rabbis who have weighed in about this agree that quinoa is not a forbidden grain but they are reluctant to certify any of it kosher for Pesach until Rabbi Fishbane or someone like him makes that trek.

In the meantime, they insist that if one wants to eat any this week we need to go through the many, many thousands of quinoa "grains" in order to separate out any stray kernals of wheat. This is such a endless task that it could take until Rosh Hashanah to get the job done.

Back in my old Brooklyn neighborhood we had a much simpler, less rabbinic solution. And in my local grocery store, every Passover season, I played a role in this.

To do things fully legitimately, the owner, Mr. Malchie, was obligated to dispose of all his milk, other diary products, and most packaged goods well before the holidays and order only those clearly marked Kosher for Passover from OU Board certified suppliers. Instead, he justified to himself and me, since his was a very marginal business (supermarkets were just beginning to appear and groceries like his were doomed), to throw anything out would put him prematurely out of business; and thus he somehow managed to acquire Kosher for Pesach stickers and, after closing, with the lights turned out, had me affix them to everything in the store.

I was just a kid and retrospectively could try to plead innocence (though, in truth, I knew we were Transgressing, with a capital T); but in the eyes of the rabbis and maybe even G_d, because of this, he and I are probably in eternal peril.

Among other things, to try to win myself back into whatever grace might be available to those living with this mortal existential dilemma, I have decided not to eat any quinoa this week or ever again until there is a definitive report from the Orthodox Union from the Bolivian wilds.