EVEN MORE FROM A SOAKED AND SALTED MIND

BUGS: If you turned off your water filter for the winter, now is the time to turn it back on (ie, NYC residents only). During the winter, there were no copepods. Now that the weather has gone warm and the water is starting to warm up, the copepods will once again be microscopically visible. So, for those of you who expect the halacha to follow the Shulchan Aruch, ignore this. The rest of you- turn the filter back on. And if you left your filter on all winter, well, too bad- you wasted a lot of filter.

VEGGIES
Some friends own a business in a far, far away galaxy. The local vaad told them to only use Bodek veggies and fruits. They told the vaad that they use Eden brand which has both the OU and a so called “frummie” hechsher. The local vaad said that they only recommend Bodek. My friends told the vaad that they would switch to Bodek and deduct from their vaad payments the difference in price between Bodek and Eden. Gosh, the vaad backed off really, really fast!! Now we don’t want to be guilty of jumping to a very wrong conclusion, but we do find it a tad unsettling that the vaad was initially so insistent. It sort of reminds us of the joke about the Vatican, the wafers they use and Wonderbread.

A MOST INTERESTING OBSERVATION:
Deborah Wenger, the boss of editing around here, reports the following:
“When I was in Seattle, I met an OU mashgiach who was at a coffee conference there. He had a great line – the mitzvah is to check for bugs, the mitzvah is not that you have to find them.”

Great line!! Is anybody paying attention????????