As a Jewish child in Newark, N.J., Joe M. Regenstein had an unusual ambition. He wanted to become a dairy farmer — and not out of a romanticized fantasy about what that work was like.
During World War II, his mother had worked on a dairy farm in upstate New York. His family would spend summer vacations working on that farm, “and I enjoyed that,” Regenstein explained in a telephone interview.
He didn’t quite realize that ambition, but he came close. Today, Regenstein is a food scientist who works both as professor at Cornell University since 1974 and, for the past three years, as visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Moreover, he has become perhaps the only secular academic expert on Jewish and Muslim religious dietary laws.
He heads the Cornell Kosher Food Initiative, which he described to The Chronicle as “providing interface between consumers, the rabbinical establishment, the regulatory establishment and the food industry, all four of whom have a need to better understand” the issues involved in the some $150 billion U.S. kosher food industry.
He also is a technical advisor to the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America, has written columns for Kashrus Magazine and been visiting professor of Judaic studies at the University of Rochester.
He recently received a grant from the Evjue Foundation — “the charitable arm of The Capital Times” Madison afternoon newspaper, according to the foundation’s Web site — to enable him to speak to groups and agencies around Wisconsin about “the rules, impact and marketing of kosher and hallal foods,” according to a release.
In that capacity, the release states, Regenstein could offer anything from an after-dinner speech to “a half-day intensive workshop for the food industry” on kashrut and hallal.
After obtaining his degrees — a bachelor’s in chemistry, a master’s in dairy chemistry at Cornell and a Ph.D. in biophysics at Brandeis University — he joined the faculty at Cornell. Then he heard a professor there give a lecture on kashrut.
“He went over the nitty-gritty of kosher slaughter; and I looked at the students and saw a complete collection of blank faces,” Regenstein said. “The kids had no context” for the information.
Regenstein mentioned this to the professor, who suggested that Regenstein give the lecture. That led to research and the realization that “there’s not a lot of material, and I could get a publication out of it.”
That led to a meeting with a rabbi who headed the Orthodox Union’s kashrut division and to questions coming to him from the food industry. “It blossomed from there,” he said. In the last “eight to 10 years,” he added the Muslim dietary laws to his knowledge.
He also is serving on the technical committee of the Animal Welfare Audit Program that is a joint project of the Food Marketing Institute and the National Council of Chain Restaurants. This is an effort, he said, “to upgrade animal welfare across the board” — raising and caring for the animals as well as slaughtering.
Loading ...