Raid on kosher meat plant may spike prices

While religious cooks are the most visible kosher buyers, they're the minority of the market compared to shoppers who cite health and safety reasons. Hence, Hebrew National's "We answer to a higher authority" tagline.

One reason kosher meat costs more is that producing it is more labor-intensive. The laws of keeping kosher, outlined in the Bible, are extensive. A few: Animals' feed can't include animal byproducts. Animals must be killed by a trained kosher slaughterer, under rabbinical supervision, and handled in a separate plant from non-kosher meat. People who keep kosher are forbidden to eat blood, so the meat is soaked and salted to remove it. Kosher Jews from Eastern Europe don't eat the back half of the cow.

"All the price from the back goes to the front," said Bosich at the Newton kosher butcher.

Kosher companies are also smaller than many other meat producers, so they lack economies of scale in marketing and logistics, Cornell's Regenstein said.

"There are a number of factors that lead to higher prices — the same types of questions can be asked of folks selling natural meat at Whole Foods versus buying Tyson's products at Wal-Mart," he said.

A handful of meat producers, including Agriprocessors, Alle Processing and Aurora Packing Company Inc., dominate the North American kosher beef industry — giving the few players pricing power. The poultry market is similar. Empire Kosher Inc. and Marvid Poultry Canada, are the top chicken sellers. Marvid raised wholesale prices for a pound of regular chicken from $1.30 to $1.62 in mid-May as the U.S. dollar remained weak against the Canadian currency.

While many grocery stores carry some packaged kosher meat, shoppers looking for fresh cuts depend on kosher butchers. Many cities and towns have one or none.

That sends some observant Jews on hours-long car trips to buy meat. Jamie Pletter, who works for an oral surgeon in Ithaca, N.Y., drives 200 miles to Monsey, N.Y., which has a large Orthodox Jewish community, once every two months or so to stock up.

"I like being able to see what it is I'm getting," she said.

Beyond the possibility that the Agriprocessors raid will make kosher meat more expensive, the arrests have revived questions about labor practices and kosher meat within the Jewish community. The Forward, a Jewish weekly, has been investigating the company's labor practices for years, raising questions about whether meat can truly be kosher if it is produced by abused workers.

A search warrant for the raid stated that a former Agriprocessors supervisor said weapons were carried at the plant and the supervisor had discovered a methamphetamine lab there. The warrant also said a rabbi at the plant berated workers and threw meat at them, and a supervisor had taped a Guatemalan man's eyes shut with duct tape, then struck him with a meat hook.

Some Jewish groups, including the Jewish Labor Committee, have called for a boycott of the company's meat.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents conservative congregations, said that as kosher laws seek "to diminish animal suffering and offer a humane method of slaughter, it is bitterly ironic that a plant producing kosher meat be guilty of inflicting any kind of human suffering."

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