Kosher Coke, Kosher Science

USA HOW COKE BECAME KOSHER AND OTHER TALES OF MODERN FOOD

ROG E R H O ROW IT Z

2 Kosher Coke, Kosher Science

Passover was a very special occasion for me as a child. My big moment,

in what often seemed an interminable reading of our Passover Haggadah, was reciting the Four Questions (first in English, then in Hebrew), each of which asked how this night was different from all other nights. To the four answers (this night is different because . . . ) I could have offered a fifth—I got to drink Coca-Cola in those ceremonial moments when the adults downed glasses of wine.

In my family of the early 1960s, Coke was only available on special occasions, such as Passover, or at the Sabbath meals held at my mother’s parents’ house. Otherwise, we drank milk, water, or juice. That was it.

But as a child, I of course never wondered how Coke achieved the status of a drink acceptable on this Jewish holiday where observance of kosher rules was so important. Not until I began researching the history of modern kosher food did I understand how this came about.

I quickly learned that other scholars had looked at how Coca-Cola became kosher and began with those sources. The standard account had a comforting narrative and a decisive ending. In 1935 Atlanta Orthodox rabbi Tobias Geffen interceded with Atlanta-based Coca-Cola as a result of inquiries from rabbis in other cities as to the kashrus (kosher status) of this popular drink. After careful investigation of its properties, Rabbi Geffen suggested a couple of changes in the drink’s composition that were accepted by Coke for a special Passover run of the product. Subsequently,

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as Marcie Cohen Ferris explains, “Observant Southern Jews breathed a sigh of relief” as they could both be kosher for Passover and still enjoy an “ice cold Coke.”1 The closer I looked, however, the more holes appeared in this reassuring tale. Documents from the Coca-Cola archives showed that Coke had received rabbinic endorsement in 1931, and from a rabbi based in Chicago. If this was so, then why did Rabbi Geffen get involved at all?

Newspaper articles showed that controversy still swirled around Coke’s kosher status in the late 1950s, shortly before I began drinking it at my family’s annual Passover Seder. These discrepancies pointed to a far more interesting, and profound, process of certifying kosher Coke, one that not only involved this signature beverage but also exposed one of the major challenges for proponents of kosher food in the mid-twentieth century: how to integrate concepts rooted in centuries of Jewish tradition with modern food chemistry. The struggles over Coke’s kosher status involved not only the drink itself, but the terms under which modern foods’ kosher status should be evaluated, what was necessary to do so, and what kind of knowledge was needed to assess a manufacturer’s claim that its products did, indeed, satisfy the requirements of traditional Jewish law. In this, Rabbi Geffen had to overcome the resistance of rabbis for whom such scientific knowledge did not seem necessary to determine if Coke was indeed kosher.

It turned out that Coke, as one of the first iconic American foods to seek kosher certification, was a testing ground for how kosher law could change modern food—and how, in turn, modern food would change the practice of kosher law. The debates sparked by certification of Coke taught Jewish authorities that they needed to assimilate modern food chemistry and understand ever changing manufacturing methods to assess a product’s compliance with kosher law. While Rabbi Geffen limited his intervention to Coca-Cola, contemporaneous initiatives by Organized Kashrus Laboratories, and its creator, Abraham Goldstein, generated a broad effort to incorporate scientific knowledge into the kosher certification process. In the end, it was the dynamic engagement of rabbinic authorities and food companies that yielded kosher Coke and opened the door to the widespread expansion of kosher food in America.

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Of Coca-Cola and Glycerin

For Rabbi Geffen, the challenge of certifying Coca-Cola was only a small part of his service to preserving Judaism and strengthening observance among Jews. His unpublished memoirs do not mention this episode, instead dwelling on his many personal interventions to help Jews— ensuring the meat provided by local shochetim was in fact kosher, developing Hebrew education for local Jews, securing a get (religious divorce) for women whose husbands had left them, and aiding a Jew who had been shockingly sentenced to eight years on a Georgia chain gang. Geffen’s special role in the case of kosher Coke reflected his location in Atlanta and the wide respect in which he was held among the networks of Orthodox rabbis in the United States.

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1870 (at that time part of Russia), Tobias Geffen came from a deeply religious family that sent him to the yeshiva in Slobodka, Lithuania, a prestigious institution of higher Jewish learning in Europe. After ordination, he studied with several of Lithuania’s leading rabbis before marrying and deciding to emigrate to America in 1903 following the Kishinev pogrom and the rise of anti-Semitic violence throughout Russia. After stays in New York City and Canton, Ohio, Geffen settled permanently in Atlanta in 1910. While his main responsibility was care of his congregation, Geffen was one of the few European-trained rabbis in the American South, with both his credentials and activities bringing him to the attention of Orthodox rabbis throughout the United States.

As he was the leading Orthodox rabbi in Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s headquarters, letters came to him from rabbis across the United States wanting to know if Coke conformed to Jewish dietary law. While Rabbi Geffen was not solely responsible for Coke’s eventual acceptance among observant Jews, he did correctly identify the main challenges. To determine Coke’s kashrus, he of course needed to learn what it contained—a subject jealously guarded by the company, eager indeed to keep its famed “secret ingredient” a secret. Promising complete confidentiality, Geffen obtained access to Coke’s manufacturing operations and had samples tested by impartial chemists.

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Figure 2.1 Rabbi Tobias Geffen. Louis and Anna Geffen family papers, box OP11, Emory University Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.

The main problems turned out to be alcohol and an odd trace ingredient called glycerin. Coke used alcohol in the manufacturing process, though there was no residue left in the final drink. During most of the year this would not have posed a problem for observant households; but Passover was special. Grain provided the source for the alcohol, thereby violating the Passover rule against eating leavened bread during that special week. Drinking Coke that used grain alcohol in the processing stage was as unacceptable on Passover as placing a loaf of bread on the table.

Fortunately it was not difficult for Coke’s manufacturers to obtain alcohol from fermented molasses, thereby addressing one of Geffen’s objections.

Glycerin posed a much more intractable problem. Essentially an industrial by-product, glycerin assumes independent existence during the processing of fatty oils for soap. It is simply the predominant chemical left in

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the residue created after the soap is extracted. In Geffen’s view, glycerin’s kosher status depended on the oil from which it came—and most of the oil used to create it was derived from animal sources, livestock bones, fats, and other parts unacceptable for food consumption. In the late nineteenth century large packinghouses developed rendering operations that boiled inedible parts into a viscous liquid sold to soap manufacturers. Such efficient use of by-products was a source of profit and also reduced the volume of foul refuse extruded from these plants. As kosher-slaughtered animals comprised only a small proportion of animals killed in a plant, it was not economical for the company to separate their bones from the body parts of nonkosher carcasses. Given this industrial practice, Geffen concluded that glycerin was treif.

But it was present in Coke in only minute quantities, less than 0.01 percent. Did such a minor ingredient necessarily make Coke treif? Kosher law, in fact, contained a permissive set of rules known as bitul (nullification) that held out the possibility that the glycerin in Coke could be considered batul—nullified—as it was such a small quantity in a large mixture.

Under traditional kosher law, bitul provides that when a small amount of a nonkosher ingredient accidentally ends up in a mixture its kashrus is not affected. As the most prevalent cases of bitul apply when the offending ingredient is no more than one-sixtieth of the mixture and does not affect it materially (known as bitul b’shishim), its intent was to address simple mistakes in the kitchen. Could such a concept apply to Coke?

With careful reference to traditional Jewish law, Geffen ruled that glycerin did not qualify for the bitul exemption. Basing his opinion on a ruling by the twelfth-century French rabbi Samuel ben Meir (known as the Rashbah) and the endorsement of this ruling by Moses Isserles in the sixteenth-century Yoreh De’ah, Geffen held that bitul applied only in cases where the mixing of troubling chemicals “was accidental, fortuitous, or unpremeditated.” Because the addition of glycerin was “normal procedure” and essential to Coke’s manufacture, the resulting mixture was treif. For these reasons Geffen held that Coke was not kosher.2 Glycerin’s widespread use in processed foods and beverages made determination of its status an issue that affected many more products than simply Coke. Since it has never aroused controversy (except among observant Jews!), glycerin’s role in our food system is not well known.

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Glycerin is hygroscopic, hungry for water or other liquids, and slightly sweet and syrupy at room temperature. With these qualities, glycerin permeates our foods, makes sliced bread stay fresh and cakes remain moist and crumbly—as well as keeping antifreeze and our car windshield washer fluids from freezing! In fact, a 1945 book on glycerin listed over fifteen hundred uses for this amazing chemical. Its kosher status thus posed enormous challenges for food companies using it in a wide array of products.3 Coke, it seemed, could not do without glycerin—though glycerin certainly was not its famed secret ingredient. Indeed, as glycerin “finds wide employment in the preparation of base extracts for flavoring purposes,”4 it is most likely that Coke’s secret concoction was dissolved into a glycerin solution so that the taste would diffuse evenly through the syrup shipped to bottling plants. And Coke was not alone in its dilemma: all soft drink manufacturers, indeed all food manufacturers that relied on bottled flavors, had traces of glycerin in their products.

Geffen may have realized that a lot was at stake with his decision on glycerin. At issue were not only the kosher status of Coke and other products containing glycerin, but, even more, the application of bitul to all modern processed food. If glycerin could be nullified under the principle of bitul b’shishim, what other substances could attain the same exemption? Might this create an avenue for loosening kosher requirements for other ingredients that were present in foods in minuscule quantities? Fundamental questions of kosher law and modern food were at stake.

Geffen’s teshuva (ruling) reflected a stringent application of kosher law. Plausibly he could have ruled differently, since glycerin did not impart any noticeable taste to Coke and comprised far less than one-sixtieth of its volume. By those measures, Geffen could instead have held that the principle of bitul b’shishim did apply and that glycerin’s presence was thus irrelevant to Coke’s kashrus. Instead, Geffen looked at processing methods and deduced that glycerin’s importance in processing meant its kashrus was in play. By doing so he endorsed the integration of modern scientific knowledge into kosher law—and created a kosher headache for food manufacturers.

Cottonseed oil offered a fortuitous solution for the problem of nonkosher glycerin. Since it was a vegetable product, it could serve as source

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for kosher glycerin. Cottonseed oil production grew steadily throughout the South in the early twentieth century as a shortening that offered an alternative to butter and lard, with firms such as Procter & Gamble and Lever Brothers developing vegetable oils for home use under the brand names Crisco and Spry. Procter & Gamble already supplied Coke with glycerin, so with Coke’s considerable leverage the company agreed to refine a special batch of cottonseed oil–derived glycerin to create kosher Coke. Rabbi Geffen inspected the factory making vegetable glycerin in July 1934; satisfied, he placed his “seal on the drums containing this ingredient.” With acceptable glycerin and alcohol secured, the rabbi issued his famous teshuva in time for Passover in 1935. In subsequent years he relied on affidavits from Proctor & Gamble executives to ensure that the glycerin used in Coke “was made from vegetable sources and no animal fat.”5 This is where our happy story should end, with American Jews reassured by Rabbi Geffen’s hecksher (endorsement) on Coke bottle caps that they could now drink Coke on Passover. And indeed, when it came to Coke, all seemed fine—at least for the next twenty years. But the extension of Rabbi Geffen’s ruling was another matter; Coke was hardly the only processed food attracting the attention of observant Jews. Rabbi Geffen did not become involved further determining the kosher status of other processed products; that initiative fell to a lay Jew whose efforts would provide the underpinnings of American kosher certification organizations.

The Invisible Chemist

Parallel to Geffen’s involvement with Coke, a more comprehensive attempt to apply chemical knowledge to kosher certification was taking shape in New York City under the leadership of Abraham Goldstein. A devout Orthodox Jew and a chemist by trade, Goldstein appreciated the complex challenges of certifying kosher food long before many rabbis whose knowledge of kosher law was rooted in foods made in nonindustrial settings. Deeply concerned that Jews would stray from the religious practice of kashrus because of modern food’s allure, Goldstein devoted his life to strengthening the capacity of Jewish organizations to enforce kosher law. While not alone in his efforts, Goldstein was distinguished by