LI Celebrity Alert: Kate Moss

Kate Moss, the famously dysfunctional size 2 supermodel, is writing a kosher cookbook.

[Looks at date on calendar. Nope, not April 1st.]

But the New York tabloid, the Daily News, much more plugged in to the affairs of supermodels than I, reported that:

According to the insider, the super-skinny Moss has already been testing out hearty kosher favorites including chicken noodle soup, salt beef, potato latkes and non-dairy pareve carrot and honey cake on her rocker boyfriend, Jamie Hince.

She was last in the news in 2007 when videos surfaced of her using cocaine. Cocaine, remember, is often cut with lactose, rendering it neither non-dairy nor pareve. Therefore you should always wait at least six hours after having meat before you snort cocaine. The carrot and honey cake can be had anytime.

Passover is Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free - Sometimes

The Jewish festival of Passover, which starts on April 9 this year (Hurray, I'm early for writing a timely article for a change) can be a confusing time for those with food allergies. As Wikipedia reminds us:

In the story of the Exodus, the Bible tells that God inflicted ten plagues upon the Egyptians before Pharaoh would release his Israelite slaves, with the tenth plague being the killing of firstborn sons. However, the Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a spring lamb, and upon seeing this, the spirit of the Lord passed over these homes, hence the term "passover". When Pharaoh freed the Israelites, it is said that they left in such a hurry that they could not wait for bread to rise. In commemoration, for the duration of Passover, no leavened bread is eaten, for which reason it is also called חַג הַמַּצּוֹת (Chag HaMatzot), "The Festival of the Unleavened Bread". Matza (unleavened bread) is the primary symbol of the holiday. This bread that is flat and unrisen is called Matzo.

Here comes the confusing part.

Specifically, five grains, and products made from them, may not be used during Passover — wheat, rye, barley, oats, and spelt — except for making matzo, which must be made from one of these five grains.

Got that? All specially-made Passover products are gluten-free, except for matzos themselves.

And to add another layer of complication, Jim Romanoff of the Associated Press wrote that "Many families keep their Passover Seders dairy-free." (Seders are the ceremonial meals served during the holiday.) Not everything for Passover will be dairy-free though. And here's another bit of long-standing confusion. Kosher foods are divided into those with meat, those with milk, and those that are neutral or parve. Parve (sometimes pareve) foods are completely dairy-free, so those of us with lactose intolerance and dairy allergies should look for foods that are labeled parve, with the full word spelled out. You'll sometimes see a capital "P" on kosher foods. That P means it's kosher for Passover, not that it's parve. That means P foods can have dairy in them.

And that brings us to a dairy-free - but not gluten-free - recipe for bread pudding, a delicacy that would normally be unavailable during Passover.

Romanoff gives a recipe for Baked Matzo Pudding with a Cherry-Almond Sauce, the sauce made with almond milk, a non-dairy milk substitute.

Salud! Oops. L'Chaim!

Kosher.com Such a Deal!

The Kosher.com site is a vast array selling multitudes of kosher foods, which of course includes many foods that are pareve (parve) or neutral. Neutral meaning they contain neither meat nor dairy and so may be eaten with any meal. (Fish does not count as meat, so vegans need to be cautious about a small proportion of pareve items.)

To get more people to turn to Kosher.com, the site "will pay anyone a $18 bonus for referring friends who purchase $100 or more of products on their site. The friend will also receive an 18% discount on his or her first order."

How do you do this? As the press release said:

To participate, visit http://www.kosher.com, register an account and sign up for the Refer-a-Friend program. Registered users can also see their order history, re-order from past orders and receive an e-mail newsletter with specials, discounts and recipes.

Milk in Meats. More Than Just Non-Kosher

Recently I received this email.

I have a question. My daughter is lactose intolerant, and it seems like it is getting worse. Any little bit of something with milk products will cause abdominal bloating /diarrhea around an hour or 2 after eating.

The other day she had a hot dog (Zwiegles brand) and she had severe abdominal pain and diarrhea after that we looked at the label and were shocked to see that it contained nonfat milk in it! Have you ever heard of this? Milk in meats? How much is in there? Do you have any insight into this?

I've been writing about this problem for a long time. It gets a page of its own in my book Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance.

Hot dogs and many cold cuts are not made directly from hunks of beef. Butchers save end products and scraps, grind them up, pack them into cylinders, and then mix in fillers to add extra protein, texture, or taste or just to make sure that the whole mass sticks together properly. You can take these fat cylinders and slice them piece by piece to make cold cuts for sandwiches. You can take the thin cylinders, add a casing of some sort, and package them as hot dogs or wurst.

The question that concerns us is what the fillers consist of. The answer is complicated, because each brand probably uses a slightly different recipe and a slightly different set of fillers.

Milk, especially non-fat dry milk, makes an excellent filler. It's full of protein and nutrients. It's low-fat. The powder becomes sticky when wet and helps to bind the scraps together.

Any commercial cold cut might contain dry milk powder or any of a number of milk products, dry or liquid, to fill specialized needs. Turkey, pork, ham-based cold cuts suffer the same fate. The amount of milk powder needed is probably not high. The flip side is that any dry milk product contain large percentages of lactose. All dry milk consists of is protein and lactose. So even small amounts can create reactions in some extremely sensitive individuals.

This practice was much more common twenty years ago than it is today, with knowledge of lactose intolerance and dairy allergies at an all-time high. Manufacturers have been removing milk from meat for years. Apparently they still haven't gone far enough.

The answer, where practical, is to use kosher meats, hot dogs, wursts, and cold cuts. Meals that contain milk and meat don't follow the Kosher dietary laws. You can be almost completely assured that any kosher equivalent will be as completely milk-free as they can possibly guarantee. (In the real world, mistakes are occasionally made, and cross-contamination occurs because manufacturing plants may not have adequate separation between different lines of food. These happen rarely.) You just need to look for a kosher symbol or the word kosher on the package, not for the word parve. Parve foods are neutral. They can contain neither milk nor meat. Obviously cold cuts and hot dogs can't be parve. Parve's a useful guarantor of non-milk status in other kosher foods though.

Russian Kosher Lactose-Free Sweets

Russian Kosher lactose-free sweets advertised on the Internet. Talk about words you'd thought you'd never see in the same sentence. Does this mean that the apocalypse is nigh or that the new millennium really has arrived?

It's for real, apparently. The website of that of the FJC, The Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. (The CIS, or The Commonwealth of Independent States, technically are eleven former Soviet Republics, including Russia, that are the remains of what used to be the USSR.)

The 'Kolomenskoye' confectionary factory, which is based in Moscow, has produced a line of sweets under the supervision of the Kashrut Department of the Chief Rabbinate of Russia headed by Rabbi Berel Lazar.

...

These delights, which include waffle cookies and two separate types of cakes, have certainly brought a smile to many faces this past weekend.

The Kashrut Department of the Chief Rabbinate of Russia guarantees the kosher element of those company products bearing the label indicating it kosherness. These products are considered to be 'parve', meaning that these treats may be eaten at any time and contain no lactose or meat products.

I've received emails from more than 30 countries since I started my website but this more than anything proves we are living on Planet Lactose.

Kosher and Parve Food Online

With Rosh Hashanah coming up next week, it's time to take a look at kosher foods available over the Internet.

Remember, it's not "kosher" that you want to look for necessarily, it's "pareve" or "parve." People who keep kosher must strictly separate meat from dairy. Dairy products can be kosher, of course, so that's why looking for kosher isn't enough. However, many foods are neither meat nor milk. They are neutral, and that's what parve means, however people might want to spell it. (Parve gives more hits than pareve in Google.)

There is no symbol that indicates that a food is parve. The word is always spelled out in full. (A "P" indicates that the food is kosher for Passover, notthat it is parve.)

Although there has been some controversy about the fine details of just how strict the enforcement of the prohibition of dairy products or dairy derivatives might be in theory, in practice I've never come across a parve product that contained any dairy. And Robyn Kozierok's Parve FAQ at nomilk.com makes this even more explicit:

Parve food may contain no detectable amounts of either meat or milk. This means zero. There are other cases in kosher law where an impurity of one part in sixty is permitted. This one-part-in-sixty rule does NOT apply to the classification "Parve". I mention this because once in a while one might hear from somebody who erroneously claims that parve food is allowed to contain very small amounts of milk.

Parve food may not contain any food derived from milk or meat ither. Thus casein, whey, lactose, and any other milk derivative renders a food dairy.

There do exist the occasional recalls of products that weren't supposed to contain dairy and do, but that can happen to any product at any time and nothing on the label can prevent that.

Some of the major kosher food shopping sites include:

● Kosher.com.

● Avi Glatt Kosher.

● Kosher Gourmet Mart.

● Shop Online at Manischewitz.

In Canada,
● Kosher Food Online.

As always, I am not recommending or endorsing these sites, just providing information about their existence.