Kosher Encyclopedia

Anyone who has witnessed the food preparation on a cruise ship will be struck by the sheer magnitude of the task. Preparation begins before anyone even arrives. Once all guests are aboard, food must be served continuously, day and night. Without a doubt, food is the lifeblood of a cruise ship. "Kosher cruise" generally refers to the food served on board being kosher. Other aspects related to Jewish law are generally not covered by kosher certification.

Kosher supervision on cruise ships is no easy task. Mega-cruise ships, with a passenger capacity exceeding 4,000, often serve over 12,000 meals daily! Food preparation occurs 24 hours a day in multiple locations. Kosher cruise ships typically consist of several cabins chartered from a larger ship. This arrangement means that kosher and non-kosher food are prepared together.

Tourists should trust kosher establishments. In order to live up to this trust, reliable kosher establishments must pay attention to many aspects.

What precautions should be taken to ensure kosher food preparation? Are there dedicated kitchens for preparing kosher food, or are there designated non-kosher kitchens for this purpose? In most cases, only a small percentage of visitors are kosher consumers, so it's more common for kosher and non-kosher food to be prepared in the same location. This inevitably creates a number of problems. Sometimes, kosher and non-kosher food are prepared on the same table, with a temporary partition placed between them. In this case, the chefs might cook pork on one side and kosher meat on the other, creating a compromise between kosher laws.

Kosher organizations must employ sufficient inspectors to cover all areas where food is prepared and eaten—both of which may be located throughout the ship. For example, the kitchen may be on the first floor, the bakery on the second, and the dining room on the third. Furthermore, the storage areas for meat, fish, and other ingredients may be on a separate floor, forcing inspectors to monitor all of these areas as necessary.

Even with sufficient inspectors, monitoring kosher food preparation can be a difficult task, especially in a kitchen that prepares both kosher and non-kosher food. Because cruise ship kitchens are extremely busy, kosher food preparation areas must be supervised at all times. Servers and waitstaff are constantly busy, some carrying kosher food and utensils, others the other way around. Meanwhile, chefs frequently need to bring in more ingredients from storage. Therefore, inspectors must constantly monitor to ensure that servers do not serve non-kosher food to kosher customers and that kosher utensils are returned to the kosher kitchen. Both accidental and deliberate violations of kosher laws are possible.

Since consumed food and ingredients cannot be replenished at sea, preparing kosher food is more difficult. This also puts pressure on the crew, who may serve non-kosher food or utensils to kosher guests.

Kosher and non-kosher kitchens may share a steam boiler to heat large soup pots. The steam does not enter the soup; it simply transfers heat around the pot. The steam is then liquefied and recycled back into the boiler for reuse. Because some soups are non-kosher, this process can transfer non-kosher flavors into the kosher soup, rendering it non-kosher. To address this issue, a chemical is added to the steam boiler to remove the flavor from the water, allowing both types of food to share the same boiler. However, our research revealed that some cruise lines are reluctant to add this chemical to the water. They claim that the water must remain potable after use, so that fresh water can be used at sea when resupply is not available. (Very large tankers can use up to 200,000 gallons of water per day, typically fresh water from ports or desalinated seawater.)

The short turnaround time of cruise ships also creates a problem: a ship may arrive in port in the morning and depart for another voyage in the afternoon, which does not allow the kosher staff time to make the necessary kosher preparations for the dishes.

To solve this problem, inspectors must board the ship at the last stop before it returns to port and then kosher the utensils while returning to port. There was once a report about a conscientious inspector who missed the boat and took a pilot boat to the cruise ship, then climbed up the rope ladder to start his work.

Sabbath food preparation presents additional challenges. All food should be cooked before Sabbath. On Sabbath, inspectors must ensure that food preparation follows the complex Sabbath procedures.

One method that works on almost any ship, kosher or non-kosher, is to serve packaged kosher meals, similar to airline meals. These meals can be heated in any oven, but the seal must remain intact after heating. They cannot be heated on the Sabbath, and must be opened according to the prescribed method.

Link to this article: http://www.halalkosher.org/index.php/article?id=382