Why Impossible Pork Isn’t Kosher

The following has been excerpted from the book Forbidden: A 3,000 year history of Jews and the Pig.

Following the company’s success with various plant-based, nonmeat “meat” products, in 2021, Impossible Foods released a new vegetarian product: Impossible Pork. Given that the ingredi ents were basically the same as its previous plant-based products, the company was surprised when neither its halal nor its kosher certification agencies would certify Impossible Pork. While Impossible Beef and other vegetarian products including Impossible Sausage remained certified as halal and kosher, it proved impossible to certify Impossible Pork. Why?

“‘The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an “OU” [kosher certification] to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,’ said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division. ‘It may indeed be completely in terms of its ingredients: If it’s completely plant-derived, it’s kosher. Just in terms of sensitivities to the consumer . . . it didn’t get it.’” Reading between the lines, we see that, by Rabbi Genack’s own admission, Impossible Pork is technically kosher. Its ingredients and method of preparation all accord with the modern kosher standards of the Orthodox Union. But it does not pass the kosher smell test.

Taken in isolation, this legal decision does not make sense. First of all, other products that also would fail the kosher smell test remain certified as kosher, from Impossible Sausage to Bacon Bits. Second, there is an almost-one-hundred-year history of pork-substitute products being certified as kosher in the United States. For example, in the 1930s, “beef frye” was all the rage. Beef frye was a product designed to emulate bacon from snout to tail—that is, from its look to its taste and smell. When it arrived on the scene, kosher consumers would stand outside the windows of delicatessens to watch the novel kosher product being sliced. Commenting on this culinary, cultural, and religious phenomenon, the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit states, “Ultimately, beef frye’s value to the kosher consumer was as much symbolic as gustatory; it, too, held out the very real and tantalizing possibility that the observance of kashruth posed no barrier to participation in the wider world, at least in a culinary sense. After all, even kosher Jews could now eat bacon!”

As food technology continued to advance, fake pig products were routinely certified as kosher—provided that their ingredients and method of preparation accorded with modern kosher standards. The desire for the American Jewish consumer to participate in American society more broadly proved key in this development. As the historian Jeffrey Gurock argues in regard to another famous fake-pig-but-still-certified-as-kosher product,

“Even items that looked patently treif—such as “bacon bits” made from soybean—graced the tables of the pious. Cynics might wonder where and how these punctilious Jews acquired a taste for that particular nontraditional addition to a tossed salad. Perhaps that supermarket selection gained its popularity from its hosts’ and hostesses’ desires to provide gentile or unkosher Jewish friends or business associates with tastes to which they were accustomed. The tradition of culinary substitution to help aspiring observant Jews feel comfortable inviting others into their homes without the fear of committing the “sin” of appearing uncultured has its own long and distinguished history.”

Bacon bits, beef frye, and other similar kosher fake pig products allow American Jews to simultaneously perform their dual identi- ties: as both observant Jews and Americans. Modern-day American Jews can look to their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and perhaps even great-great-grandparents and find them eating fake pig products certified as kosher in the United States.

So what’s the beef with Impossible Pork? It would seem that the stumbling block for this product, which looks and tastes so much like the pig, is the unambiguous word “pork.” Declaring “pork” kosher just did not feel right—even though it is not really pork. This feels a bit like another instance of “safe treyf,” in that products la- beled “bacon” or “sausage” or “frye” can pass the kosher smell test, but “pork” cannot.6 Rabbi Genack himself admits that this is the case: “‘We’ve been inculcated for millennia’ against eating pigs, Genack added. ‘This is something that’s been verboten and that we don’t eat. It takes time for the person to absorb that this is syn- thetic, (that) it’s not real pig.’” Unlike fake “bacon” or fake “crab”— products routinely certified as kosher—fake “pork” is beyond the pale. To truly understand this perplexing ruling, we need to contextualize it within the more-than-three-thousand-year history of Jews and the pig. It is only then that we understand, for some Jews, the impossibility of Impossible Pork.

Does the Pig Stand Alone?

The time has come to answer a question that vexes any historical inquiry: Is this case study exceptional? Thus, we must ask, Is the story of Jews and the pig unique? Having spent almost two decades pondering this question, I have reached the conclusion that the short answer to this question is yes. But it is worth taking a moment to give a slightly longer answer.

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