Mystery (Agriprocessors) Meat
By Nathaniel Popper
A reader from suburban Chicago was mystified when he made a trip to the kosher aisle of his supermarket this last weekend. There, among the kosher soups and meats, he found packages of Agriprocessors’ turkey and corned beef, being sold under the Aaron’s Best label.
The presence of these packages was a mystery because Agriprocessors ceased to exist this past summer — nearly a year after an immigration raid at the company’s Iowa slaughterhouse — when new owners bought the company and renamed it Agri-Star. How then, did meat from a company that no longer exists end up on the supermarket shelves all of these months later? Is it old meat — or is there a new company masquerading as the recently departed? The new owners of Agri-Star are also not producing beef in their Iowa facility, so whence the corned beef?
Our reader is not the only one who has had questions of this sort. Menachem Lubinsky, a kosher trade consultant, and one-time spokesman for Agriprocessors, recently saw Rubashkin’s label meat in Brooklyn stores and wondered: “Is this old product or new? And how did it get here?”
Calls to the store and the company did not immediately clear things up. A spokesman for the Jewel-Osco store in Evanston, Ill. said that the packages came from Agri-Star, the new company that purchased Agriprocessors out of bankruptcy in July. When that purchase happened, though, Agriprocessors ceased to exist, and the label our reader saw clearly has the old company’s name. Presented with this conflict, the spokeswoman for Jewel-Osco wrote back: “Our records show that the product was sourced from Agri-Star. You may want to give them a call directly to determine their packaging strategy.”
July 15, 2009, 7:06pm
Agriprocessors: Execs Await Trial, Workers Stage a Play
By Nathaniel Popper
An Iowa judge recently postponed one of the trials for top executives at the Agriprocessors kosher meat company. The executives were charged with nearly 10,000 separate child labor violations after the company was the subject of a massive immigration raid last May. This postponement means that the full story of the underage workers arrested during a raid at the plant will not be told until next year, at the soonest, when the trial is now set to commence.
In the meantime, though, some of workers who were caught in the raid are finding other venues in which to tell their story. Many of the former workers have been interviewed for an upcoming documentary film, abUSed, which is being done by the Guatemalan director Luis Argueta. A more unexpected forum for the voices of workers came in a very novel piece of theater that has been playing in small towns around the Midwest over the last few weeks. The production is called, “La Historia de Nuestras Vidas,” or “The History of Our Lives,” and it stars seven former Agriprocessors workers who were caught in the raid and sentenced to five months in jail. The men were brought together by a group called, Teatro Indocumentado, or Undocumented Theater, and coached on how to deliver their stories on stage.
As the Forward reported last fall, many of the former workers have been released from jail but kept in the United States until the trial of Agriprocessors’s executives. The actors are all in this category, and they tell of their confusion in the play.
Our American Dream had become a nightmare.
And the land of freedom had become our prison.
We came here so that we could provide for our families, and improve their future.
But we’ll return to them with empty hands.
We made friends here, but now they are gone, deported, I don’t know where.
And meanwhile, we wait — without knowing for how long,
We are still waiting,
Unable to make a life here and unable to return home.
When the production appeared in Minnesota, a reporter on local public radio wrote, “The acting wasn’t stellar and the writing wasn’t award-winning, but the close of the play brought down the house, and everyone got to their feet to applaud the performance.”
September 5, 2008, 7:00pm
Agriprocessors’ Bi-Coastal Critics
By Daniel Treiman
Agriprocessors — the kosher meat giant that has been in the national spotlight ever since its Iowa slaughterhouse was the target of a massive federal immigration raid in May — is taking flak from critics east and west.
The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe both published editorials yesterday assailing Agriprocessors for its treatment of its workers. This time, however, the focus isn’t on allegations of mistreatment of workers at its Iowa plant (a story our Nathaniel Popper broke back in 2006).
Instead, the papers are unloading on Agri over its efforts to prevent workers at its Brooklyn distribution center from unionizing (another story Nathaniel broke for the Forward, this one just last month).
Both papers take aim at an attempt by Agriprocessors to void a 3-year-old vote in favor of unionization by its Brooklyn workers. The company has filed an appeal with the Supreme Court arguing that workers who are in the country illegally have no right to unionize, a position that, both papers note, flies in the face of a 1984 Supreme Court precedent.
August 6, 2008, 8:52pm
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld: Is Agriprocessors Meat Kosher?
By Daniel Treiman
Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the Modern Orthodox spiritual leader of Washington’s Ohev Sholom-The National Synagogue, has penned a scathing op-ed for The New York Times about the growing controversy over labor conditions at the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse:
…News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week.
This poses a grave problem and calls into question whether the food processed in the plant qualifies as kosher.
You see, there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.
The affidavit filed in the United States District Court of Northern Iowa, for instance, alleges that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant. If true, this calls into question the reliability and judgment of the rabbi in charge of making sure the food was kosher.
What’s more, two workers who oversaw the poultry and beef division were recently arrested for helping illegal immigrants falsify documents. If they were willing to break national immigration laws, one could reasonably ask whether they would be likely to show the same lack of concern for Jewish dietary laws.
It’s no surprise that an article like this, written by a Modern Orthodox rabbi with a prominent pulpit, and appearing in the national newspaper of record, is making waves (and drawing fire). Indeed, it’s currently the third-most e-mailed and fourth-most blogged article on the Times Web site.
Herzfeld’s article is particularly noteworthy since, heretofore, many of the loudest voices raising concerns about conditions at Agriprocessors have been from outside the Orthodox community. But it’s Orthodox Jewry that is the main group involved in the supervision of kashrut, and, quite likely, the largest consumer base for Agriprocessors products. And Herzfeld’s argument — that working conditions can be taken into account in determining whether or not food products are kosher — in some ways goes even further than the Conservative movement’s Hekhsher Tzedek program, which itself has been criticized by some in the Orthodox world for bringing ethical considerations to bear on kosher food production. (The Hekhsher Tzedek initiative simply bills itself as an effort to “display a seal on already designated kosher foods that reflects production benchmarks consistent with Jewish ethical standards” — not to intervene in the process of certifying food kosher.)
Finally, it’s also significant that Herzfeld publicly calls out the Orthodox Union and Rabbinical Council of America — two organizations he’s a member of — for responding to the Agriprocessors mess in a way that he says has “fallen far short of what is needed to be done and have done little to diminish the extent of the desecration of God’s name.”
Read Herzfeld’s full article here.
May 14, 2008, 2:23am
America’s Biggest Kosher Plant and Largest-Ever Immigration Raid
By Daniel Treiman
Agriprocessors is racking up the records. Its Postville, Iowa, facility was already America’s biggest kosher meat plant. Now, it also can claim to be the site of what federal officials say is the largest immigration raid in U.S. history.
The JTA has some more on the raid. Also, check out the extensive coverage from the Des Moines Register.
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