Why There Are 1,500 Kosher Certifications
The kosher aisle looks like chaos — competing seals, competing standards, competing rabbis. But the story behind it isn't modern piety run amok. It starts with Leviticus, which lists the kosher animals but never explains why, and a single sentence about not cooking a calf in its mother's milk that becomes the entire meat-and-dairy system. Industrialization broke the local butcher relationship and created the need for third-party verification, and the market did the rest: 1,100 certification agencies by 2014, nearly 1,500 by 2021. Along the way, real halakhic disagreements — like whether…
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