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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Sure, this only really works on the scale of a single store or restaurant: instead of offering both kosher and non-kosher (or halal and non-halal: the same principle applies, and for most non-Jews and non-Muslims the impact is similar) food, the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely. Though for something like a chain supermarket, or Amazon that's a unified marketplace dominated by a single store (that is also invested in reputation of its partners), this logic also holds, with minor caveats.

I agree that Taleb's example with peanut allergy and peanut non-availability on planes would be more apt. But people with allergies are not really a political block and it has more to do with insurance, probably.

Can you easily find pork in Israel? I can't in Turkey.

the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely

I don't know how it looks in theory, but I do know how it works in practice. In practice, in the US, the number of kosher restaurants outside of the "Jewish" areas is vanishingly small. On the contrary, the number of non-kosher restaurants in, say, Israel is quite decent. I didn't ever bother to pinpoint why exactly Taleb's argument doesn't work there, but it is absolutely clear it does not, and thus why it does not becomes rather a theoretical exercise.

Can you easily find pork in Israel?

Yes, very easily. For example, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiv_Ta'am or here: https://mania-m.co.il/ (sorry their English site seems to be broken, but the pictures are pretty clear).

There are also many restaurants that do not serve pork, but still do not maintain official kosher certification - either because of costs, or because of limitations on recipes and processes that involves. E.g. cheeseburger is very much not kosher, even if you use kosher beef. Thus, McDonalds has 2/3 of his locations is Israel non-kosher and 1/3 kosher (no cheeseburgers there, obviously). They do use kosher meat (so here Taleb's theory is correct - it'd be uneconomical to use two different types of beef) in both kinds.

Is kosher beef not much more expensive than non-kosher? In the USA there is a difference in price of 2-3 times. I have a hard time imagining that not making it economical to use two different types of beef.

I think in Israel, it wouldn't be much more expensive in practice, because you won't find any local supplier that would be big enough to supply McDonalds and yet not already set up to supply kosher beef - because most of other large consumers in Israel do want kosher meat. Meat is quite expensive in Israel, and limits on import is one of the reasons. But I think this applies to non-kosher beef too, which likely would be imported. In general, meat politics in Israel is complex and pretty bizzare and changing a lot, I am sure I'm not up to date on all the details.