Buy kosher food, even if you don’t keep kosher

Keeping kosher in itself can be challenging for some people. Add the remoteness of most military bases and isolation from a large Jewish community and the challenge can get quite big. The following is kind of a personal plea for service members to help out in a very small way.

My wife and I only started keeping strict kosher a few months before we were married. We had eaten “kosher style” for longer than that, but maintaining a kosher home was something that we both saw as important and used this life-cycle event as a starting point for our new endeavor.

Before that point, I never really gave much thought to food that was actually certified kosher. Once this started to matter to me, I realized that there are a lot of everyday food items that do have a kosher certification. Meat and cheese are a whole different story, but snacks, cereals, vegetables, drinks, and just about any other food item is available from a manufacturer that certifies their food as kosher.

The next time you buy a box of Cheerios or a some Chips Ahoy cookies, take a quick look at the box (or bag) and you will most likely find a hechsher. Yeah, that U in a circle (actually an O), means it is certified kosher!

So why am I telling you all of this? If you keep kosher now, you surely know this already, and if you don’t keep kosher then you probably don’t care.

The idea is not to convince everyone to keep kosher (as nice as that would be), but to convince you to buy kosher food when the option is available. Everyone wins in the end with my plan, here’s why:

• Prices are usually the same or pennies different between most brand name items. When you have 10 kinds of potato chips to choose from, why not add one more criterion to help you decide?
• If more people buy kosher items, then it is more likely that smaller commissaries (or local stores) will stock those items. This makes it easier for everyone to buy kosher food.
• By supporting companies that certify their food, we encourage more companies to do so.
• Somewhere, there is a rabbi or qualified Jew who gets paid to monitor and certify these manufacturing/processing plants. Why not help to keep these Jews employed? –> here’s a perfect example

My main point here is that, with little or no impact on your eating habits, everyone can help to make kosher items more readily available.