WHERE'S THE BEEF??

Two weeks ago, a story ran in the Forward News paper about a group of people in the Mid-West who were trying to purchase kosher meat that was not glatt. Conservative Jews and their rabbis in some Mid-West communities were described as having essentially no luck in purchasing meat that is not glatt.

The article correctly pointed out that Rubashkin sells non glatt meat. If they didn’t, they would essentially go bankrupt. Here’s how it works.

A shechita house buys cows to slaughter. Let’s say that they order one hundred head of beef. Out of that hundred, let’s say six of them will be treif from the get-go. That leaves 94 animals still. Out of those 94, maybe 16 might actually be glatt by the loosest of definitions. That leaves an awful lot of kosher, but not glatt kosher, pieces of meat. So, where does all this non glatt meat go?

As a group of shuls in the Mid- West found out, that meat goes bye bye. They have tried ordering through a local distributor. When that did not work, they went straight to Rubashkin and placed a direct order. So far, that hasn’t worked yet, either.

Here in the METRO NYC area, you pretty much can not buy NON glatt meat. The exception would be Hebrew National Cold Cuts and hot dogs. But, raw meat that is not glatt does not exist in this market.

So where does all that non glatt meat go? Who gets to buy it? Where is it sold? It seems to us, the issue is not whether or not we have to eat glatt. The hashgacha agencies sold us a bill of goods that said that if we didn’t buy glatt, we might not be getting kosher at all, so we all switched to glatt. When the market tipped, stores told us that they would no longer stock non glatt as there was no longer any demand for it!

It is no secret that the amount of meat that comes just into NYC marked glatt is way over any probable statistical projection. That is to say, the amount of meat that is sold as glatt is beyond the statistical amount of what should be available on the market. On top of that, the definition of glatt has been, in a sense, changed to a lower standard. What we call glatt today, would have been rejected (as glatt) twenty years ago.

So, our question is: Where’s the beef?