My religion 101 course, way back in my first college semester, used "The Sacred and The Profane" by Mircea Eliade, published in 1968, as a text. Regardless of whether you believe that all cultures divide the world this way, observant Jews certainly do. "Kosher USA" is the story of how a set of religious laws that were elaborated when food that was produced and cooked locally, in plain sight, evolved in the modern world where we are far separated from the origins of our food.

Kosher USA examines the struggle to transform Kosher certification in mid-twentieth century as food increasingly became an industrial product. It explains why certification (the process by which a particular food is verified OK for observant Jews to eat) passed from the hands of rabbis who knew the law but could not apply it to a factory, into the hands of specially trained chemists who are able to follow the chain of evidence to determine whether a permissible raw material emerges as an acceptable final product.

Mr. Horowitz is a skilled writer and patiently explains the intricacy of Jewish food law, highlighting the detailed knowledge needed when a tiny production detail instantly renders a food unfit for consumption by observant Jews. He stresses the role that debate continues to play in Jewish legal formations of all kinds. (Twenty years ago a rabbi friend served on a commission to determine if USA humane slaughter rules should be adopted in place of traditional Jewish humane slaughter rules. More recently Muslim friend served on a Jewish-Muslim panel on the same question.) Mr. Horowitz is sympathetic to the distress of observant mothers and their modern children when popular products like Coke and marshmallows fall on the wrong side of religious law.

This is a legalistic book and I found it very interesting to read as a story of the sacred and the profane.

I received a review copy of "Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food" by Roger Horowitz (Columbia University) through NetGalley.com.