Actually, my first thought was the opposite: Kosher and Halal is big business. As pointed out by others, products associated with religions that are not exclusively religious- food products, hospitals, schools- is actually a pretty big portion of this.
I love BB most of the time but posts like this are pretty lazy. It’s meant to scare up “see how rich church’s are!” reaction but the methodology and conclusion here isn’t that at all. It just shows that religion-related businesses are a significant part of the economy.
True, but all of the Jews and Muslims in the country combined are only 8.7 million people (5.4 million Jews, 3.3 million Muslims), and not all of them are going to be eating strict halal or kosher.
Actually, come to think of it… calls mother
My mother manages the finances for Cleveland Kosher; while she didn’t give me any confidential information, her organization is the local kosher certification group for the bakeries and kosher food outlets serving the Cleveland Jewish community; it’s on the significantly smaller side compared to the Orthodox Union (the OU, which does that circled U symbol), as they’re international in scale, but she doubts that they do more than a quarter million a year at her organization, and the businesses that they oversee are small and locally owned. The OU, due to its scale and international reach, is probably in the billion-plus range from her estimates.
I have no doubt that, especially when you add the OU into the equation, the annual total gross economics of kosher and halal food in the US is in the low billions, because you’re talking about the food and drink needs for several million people who aren’t served by anything else in this pork-happy country.
But that’s the point–kosher and halal will be the low billions, totaling maybe four to five percentage points out of the $1.2 trillion that the article discusses. So, yes, while on a per capita basis, Jews and Muslims will contribute more to the aggregate “religious income” due to our dietary needs (which are otherwise not supported in the US), we’re, combined, three percent of the total population. And that’s just going to be a proportionate drop in the bucket compared to the 70.6% of the populace that is American Christianity in one flavor or another.
Soup kitchens and religious-run hospitals only need to exist where there isn’t a functional tax-paid social network providing these services. The idea that the US is only comparable to third-world hellholes like Myanmar in terms of charitable giving isn’t a good thing. Places like Sweden don’t give as much to charity not because they are mean selfish people but because they can rest assured that their (admittedly high) taxes will make sure that their poor neither starve nor go without medical treatment.
I bet people who do not identify as Jewish eat wayyyy more kosher food than Jewish people do. Again, the point of this study wasn’t “look how much religious people spend/make/etc.” It was to show how ingrained religious organizations are in our economy. Kosher food is not an insignificant amount of that.
I will concede that this is not the case with Halal.
I’ll back you up on this one, I grew up in a (relatively) very Jewish area of the US, enough so that during Passover my high school served Kosher meals. I at them over the normal meals when I could , mostly because they were of a significantly higher quality for about the same price.
I at a a few different Jewish delis that served Kosher.
Where I live now doesn’t have a Kosher deli near me, but there is a Halal butcher that I do shop at from time to time since it has better better selection of non-pork meats than the closer or more convenient stores with meat departments.
So I’m not Jewish, but I do occasionally eat that way because it’s how I remember eating occasionally when I was much younger.
And those government services would be completely unnecessary in a free and prosperous economy where everyone can find meaningful work and pay their own way. On that same note, if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle. We could conjure any number of progressively more ideal hypothetical worlds, but we don’t live in any of those. The fact remains that people fall through the cracks wherever you go. France has high taxes too, and you still see homeless people in Paris. Thankfully, some people other than governments concern themselves with these worldly needs and try to help.
Governments can extract tax; churches cannot extract tithes. If there was broad-base political will to do so then the government could easily absorb such services and collect the tax, so where is the political will? If we believe the notion you put forward, Americans lack the political will to empower their government to fix the problems because such money is earmarked for religious spending. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. It makes even less sense when you consider the large overlap of religious groups and social justice-minded voters. For example, for decades most of the political will for Democrat social programs was driven by a Northern Catholic base urged to vote their conscience. Are they now voting their conscience to save the money they need to act to cover the inaction of the government that could do the job if they just voted their conscience?
I would propose a much simpler answer: most Americans just don’t care, and the those who do don’t trust the government to properly spend money that they could spend directly.
Personally I see the benefit of both charitable giving and tax funded services, but I prefer both at level as close to the local as possible, because the larger the agency, the less accountable it becomes to those who write the checks and the more vulnerable it is to regulatory capture.
OTOH a ton of what is available on any given supermarket shelf is under kosher supervision. Far more than can be explained by the population of observant Jews & Muslims (Muslims are permitted to eat kosher food).
Basically measuring the kosher market would skew the numbers completely.
There’s also the possibility of combining both. Subsidised charities with volunteers in charge of the distribution of food, for example (among other tasks). This results in a more friendly environment for beneficiaries than if it was done by employees or civil servants.
nod Yeah, that’s a solid point, and I concede on that aspect, for sure. I was thinking more along the lines of “what observant Jews and Muslims eat” and not the general increase from non-Jews incidentally or intentionally eating kosher foods. Basically, I was thinking of Boris the Cleveland Kosher Butcher, not Hebrew National, but, yeah, of course the percentage of Hebrew National’s business from Jews versus non-Jews is going to be population proportionate–and yet still count under the “kosher market” aggregate. As would commerce like @VenTatsu’s enjoyment of kosher delis.
Heck, in regards to the kosher deli comment, that actually brings up a memory from my childhood; about 20-ish years ago, there was a pilot program to try to have a certified kosher concessions stand at the Cleveland baseball stadium, as there wasn’t one previously; I attended the first game (the Indians lost, as they always did whenever I attended) when the stand was opened, and I distinctly recall that, not only was the line filled with mostly non-Jews, the line was at least 4x longer than any other stand (and they ran out of fries by the 4th inning, and out of everything by the 6th). And one of the reasons it was so popular was because the kosher concessions were perceived as being of superior quality by the non-Jews, which the planners of the booth had not accounted for in their purchasing.
So, yeah, I concede this point in that regard, but I’ll still argue that the totality of the kosher industry will only be a small amount of the staggering sum mentioned in the article, especially given how many pies the Catholic Church has its fingers in.
Thats not a good example. People who are serious about kashrut won’t eat Hebrew National. They may claim to answer to a higher authority but in fact their supervision is problematic. Also they are really a nationwide brand and can be found in areas with zero Jews.
Sorry, but I hadn’t had my morning caffeine yet when I wrote that. The parallel still stands, however, even if they’re not glatt and are “only” certified by Triangle-K, because they’ll still get folded under the greater umbrella that this article is counting as a “kosher” business–even if many of the Orthodox won’t eat it because it isn’t glatt.
Its not just that they aren’t glatt, there are known issues with the supervision/production. Its odd because the head of Triangle-K is above reproach but thats how it is. No frum Jews will eat Triangle-K meat.
All the more the shame because where I was in the US recently HN was the only kosher meat in the area.
And yet, there is more to Judaism than just the frum, despite how they wish otherwise.
From the perspective of the non-Jews, the difference between glatt and Triangle-K are effectively nothing, and they are all folded up under the greater umbrella of “kosher food” from their perspective. You are saying “well, since the Orthodox don’t view it as kosher, therefore it isn’t kosher and shouldn’t be counted”, which isn’t the perspective being used here.
Not at all. I clearly pointed out that HN is a national brand and that many other national brands are also under supervision whether they are mainly bought by Jews or not and thats why its an over count.
Basically, I was thinking of 
The parallel still stands, however, even if they’re not glatt and are “only” certified by Triangle-K, because they’ll still get folded under the greater umbrella that this article is counting as a “kosher” business–even if many of the Orthodox won’t eat it because it isn’t glatt.
