The koshering of the Oreo cookie (2008)

Read it again. The timeline was the other way around. First they switched away from lard for health reasons.

Later creameries saw that there was a possibility of putting in Oreos (since all the ingredients were kosher), so contacted them about getting the facility certified.

If (other than eggs) your product has no animal products it's usually pretty easy to get it certified. It requires mainly a very very intensive cleaning, and then careful record keeping and quality controls on sourcing.

Is it no longer so? Is saturated fat now considered OK?

> Not fat (the replacement was also fat) but rather saturated fat was the evil one.

Shortening is vegetable oil that's been treated to transform it into (in part) saturated fat.

So it's not even about that, either.

Butter doesn't provide the same texture as lard/shortening in pie dough (something to do with the balance of saturated fats), so butter usually only supplements for flavor.

Or, of course, you could use olive oil instead of the lard. It tastes just as great but it's actually good for you and it's even kosher/halal.

Actually, to be honest, I find the olive oil tastes _much_ better than the lard, but to each their own (my father makes olive oil).

> Is that always "kosher"?

Yes, that is always required. The basic rule: The same type of heat that was used to cook the food, is the same type of heat needed on the vessel to clean out the food. The minimum heat is boiling water.

Since an oven gets very hot, you need high heat to clean it. (Hot enough that a tissue pressed on the metal turns black - it doesn't need to glow red hot.)

> and seems like requirements for that procedure could easily vary between certifying organizations.

No, that's not one of the things that vary, that one's universal.

To an outsider, the stuff that varies would seem very minor. It won't be anything large like this.

I feel bad for the wives though. They had someone (who was willing to risk jail) trying to help them, and now they don't.

This is about selling ice cream, though. Most of which had HFCS in it, especially in '97.

HFCS and unhealthy was not the point. The non-kosher certification prevented sale to Jewish/Muslim populations, not degree of the unhealthiness.

HFCS was just an incidental descriptor from what I can tell.

HFCS is halal/kosher, whereas lard is not.

Excellent point--the pressure still came from religious dietary restrictions, but nabisco felt it from people who wanted to be in compliance with those.

"Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only nonGMO food (which includes organic). The color of the box is pink and the others yellow . We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all pink, i.e. will opt for nonGMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat nonGMO, the guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store realizing the neighborhood is only nonGMO switches to nonGMO to simplify life, which impacts the local wholesaler, and the stories continues and “renormalizes”."

Yeah...no. I have kids like that. We just tell them tough, cook your own food if you want something different. Likewise, I have a brother and sister-in-law that are vegan. We invite them over for holiday meals, but we don't cook vegan. We tell them to bring something that they are willing to eat and if there happens to be other food that we are serving that they are willing to eat then good for them. And you know what? It's turns out that not changing what you cook for people's dietary needs is okay and everybody survives and still gets along just fine.