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Kashrus Awareness Staff

Lettuce Train to Strain

Aphids & Thrips


Let’s join Rabbi Yisroel Langer Dayan at the cRc Beis Din and Rav of Congregation Bais Yitzchok as he gives us a tutorial on how to check your own lettuce at home.





Rabbi Hisiger: Hello everyone and welcome back to Let's Talk Kashrus presented by the Kashrus Awareness Project in conjunction with Torah Anytime. Today I am privileged to be joined by Rabbi Yisroel Langer, Rav of Congregation Beis Yitzchok in Chicago and a Dayan with the Chicago Rabbinical Council. Rabbi Langer, thank you for being here.

Rabbi Langer: My pleasure.

Rabbi Hisiger: I'd like to talk to you today about a very important topic which is checking for bugs, otherwise known as בדיקת תולעים. On a home level people don't realize that many of the products that they bring into their homes, even those fruits and vegetables that may have officially been checked already, require either initial checking or rechecking. And so perhaps today you could give us a little overview about what concerns people should have when bringing fruits and vegetables into their homes, which items require checking and then we'll discuss specific methods of checking.

Rabbi Langer: So when it comes to leafy vegetables, romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, all the different lettuces, herbs, these are all growing outdoors and even when they're growing in greenhouses, bugs get in and they can infest a crop. In the olden days, the way we, some people still today, they'll take, the way they check lettuce is they'll take the lettuce, hold it up to the sunlight and see if there's anything crawling, see anything which looks like a bug. And as the ערוך השולחן tells us that even things which are דק מן הדק, they're very, very small and can only be seen לאור השמש, can only be seen by sunlight, those are considered to be insects as well. You gotta be very careful, very careful when you check.

Rabbi Hisiger: Did you mention sunlight specifically as opposed to, I guess, electrical lighting?

Rabbi Langer: Well, if you have an imitation of sunlight, something with strong lighting where you could hold it up to the, you know, to that light, that would also be adequate. That would be good. The problem is that there are bugs that really get camouflaged into the, into the lettuce. You have these aphids, green aphids, and it really takes on the appearance of the lettuce, which makes it more difficult to check. And people aren't seeing all the bugs on the actual lettuce. In addition, when you have to go after a lot of leaves and you're holding it up to the sunlight, so you can kind of put the strain on your neck and your eyes start to, you know, one leaf after the next. You start getting used to it. It's difficult, becomes difficult to check. So the last number of years, what the השגחות came up with is a new method of how to check, and that is what's called the Thrip Cloth Method. That's how we refer to it, or the shmatte Method. The way it works is that you're going to take the lettuce, you're going to cut it up into separate leaves, and you're going to put it into a bowl of water with a little bit of soap or a veggie wash, something slippery, and you're going to swish it around, swish it around. We like to view this as basically you're like, you clean your, your dirty laundry. You have dirty laundry. How do you clean dirty laundry? Is that you're going to put detergent, you're going to have agitation, and water, and you're swishing it around for about a minute or so. The more, the better you agitate, the cleaner it's going to get. And that's basically what you're doing right now, is that you're in the cleaning stage. You're in the cleaning stage, you're not ready to check. You're going to swish it around for a minute or so. Then you're going to pull the lettuce out of the water, and spill the water out. You spill it down the drain. There are going to be bugs in that water, almost guaranteed. There are going to be bugs in there. There's no need to check it. You spill it down the drain, and repeat a second time. Put the lettuce back into a bowl of soapy water, swish it around for about a minute, pull the lettuce out, and again, you're likely to have bugs in it again, so you're just going to pour the water out. Now, we're going to put the lettuce back into a bowl the third time. Now we think that maybe there's a fighting chance. Maybe this lettuce is going to be clean. So the way it works is you're going to swish it around, just like you did till now. Put a little bit soap in, swish, swish. Pull the lettuce out, and we're going to pour this water through what's called a thrip cloth. A thrip cloth is basically a piece of cloth which is fine like silk. You're going to sandwich it in between two strainers, and you're going to pour that water through that cloth. You're going to examine the cloth now on a light. You're going to get what's called a bug light, and you're going to put the cloth onto that bug light, and you're going to examine the cloth very carefully. If you see that the cloth is clean, there are no bugs on that cloth, then we could assume, for halachik purposes, that it's not מצוי. It's not common for there to be any bugs left back in the lettuce. He just washed it three times really well, and no bugs came up on that cloth after that third round. We could assume, for halachik purposes, that that lettuce is going to be clean and ready to eat. Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and take the, spill the water out of the bowl, and we're going to take that soapy lettuce, and put it back into a bowl of plain clean water. You got to get rid of the soap anyway. You're going to swish it around again, and just in case, just in case, there is one bug that's going to be left behind. So, he'll probably come out now when you swish it around, and you pull the lettuce out again one more time, pour the water out, and that lettuce is ready to be eaten. If you're going to find even one bug on that cloth, we're going to have to repeat the process, put it back into soapy water, and recheck the cloth.

Rabbi Hisiger: Now, we're talking here about fresh romaine lettuce, and fresh regular lettuce, and things like that.

Rabbi Langer: I just want to point out that sometimes you buy lettuce in the store, it says triple washed on it. You know, you have maybe a certification that you're not really familiar with. You don't want to trust that. The triple wash doesn't really mean anything. Triple wash could mean that there are three shower heads over a conveyor belt. You know, you can have a large tub of lettuce that is going through these conveyor belts, and there's really, some of the lettuce is not even, is barely getting wet. So, triple wash doesn't really mean anything to us. It's got to be checked, just like, you know, fresh hearts, or fresh whole heads of lettuce that you're buying from the store.

Rabbi Hisiger: So, just a few questions that I'm sure our viewers would want to follow up with. First of all, like you said, we're talking about fresh lettuce, lettuce that is not produced under supervision. Even if it says power washed, and this washed, and that washed, it doesn't matter, like you're saying, because we don't know what that means from a kashrus perspective. But if I go into a store and I see a sealed package of Romaine lettuce leaves, and it has a reliable השגחה on it, that I could buy comfortably, bring it home, and I don't need to wash it?

Rabbi Langer: If you feel, if you're comfortable with that השגחה, you can rely on it, and you can eat that. You do not have to do any further.

Rabbi Hisiger: So, I don't have to worry that there was infestation from the growing process, nor from the transport process?

Rabbi Langer: Correct.

Rabbi Hisiger: Okay, that's question number one. Question number two, if someone wants to follow through your recommendation of this aphid checking process, how do they get that paraphernalia? A bowl, I guess, they just buy, but if they want to buy the aphid...

Rabbi Langer: Well, we call it a thrip cloth. You can call it an aphid cloth if you like. We call it a thrip cloth, or a shmatte. You can buy it, you can get it online, it's called the bug checking cloth. You can get it at a lot of the השגחות - at the CRC, other השגחות also.

Rabbi Hisiger: And that cloth could be used multiple times?

Rabbi Langer: It could be used over and over.

Rabbi Hisiger: Over and over. You just wash it off?

Rabbi Langer: Until the cleaning lady loses it.

Rabbi Hisiger: Okay.

Rabbi Langer: It's durable. Even if it catches bugs, you just clean it off, and then you can reuse it. Correct. And two strainers, you can go to the dollar store, get two cheap strainers, and you're good to go. It's not as scary as it seems.

Rabbi Hisiger: Yeah, I was gonna say, it sounds a little overwhelming, for someone who's never done it.

Rabbi Langer: Once you do it, you get in the habit of doing it, it becomes part of your kitchen. It's really not that difficult. Ideally, a person should get some training, not major training, but somebody who knows what the bugs look like, to point out what bugs do look like. Because many people, when you talk to them about insects and produce, they're thinking about ants and spiders and roaches and things that they see around the house. That's not what you're going to usually find in the lettuce. It's going to be much smaller. They are visible to the naked eye. They are visible, you don't need microscopes and things like that. They're all visible to the naked eye, and you could see them. Usually, I find people are thrown off. You show them the bugs. I wasn't expecting that. It's an idea. It's important when you check the cloth, you should check the cloth the way that you would read the fine print of a newspaper. Some people, when you read the fine print of a newspaper, they’ve got to take the glasses off to be able to see, and they look really close. That's the way you're going to want to check the cloth. Some people have got to put their glasses on, reading glasses, to check it. However you're going to look for the fine print of a newspaper, that's how you're going to check the cloth. When you're checking the cloth, some people like to use their fingers, and they start touching things. You end up squashing the bugs and making them harder to realize that that's a bug. We recommend you taking a bottle of spray, plain water in a spray with a mist, and you spray on something. You're not sure if it's a bug. You spray it, and it has appendages. It's going to spread out a little bit, making it much easier to tell that it's a bug. I would recommend that if somebody's trying on their own to figure out how to use it in order to detect the bugs, you may want to use that water from that first round, pour it through the cloth, just to teach yourself what a bug is, and then you'll see the bigger bugs. When you see the bigger bugs, like the Ramba”n in Parshas Bo, from the גדולים, you'll go to the קטנים, and you'll see the bigger bugs, and you'll learn about the smaller bugs, the smaller insects. You'll pick up on that also.

Rabbi Hisiger: Now because I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation fruits and vegetables generally, could you just give us a little summary of other vegetables? You mentioned leafy vegetables like romaine lettuce and regular lettuce, things like that. Are there other vegetables for which this process would work, or are there other vegetables for which people have to be concerned about insect infestation?

Rabbi Langer: There are plenty of vegetables and fruits and berries out there that have infestation concerns, and this would be, you know, it can go on for hours, not the time and place for that, but there are some other things that we'll use the thrip cloth. It's really basically leafy, leafy, leafy things, herbs, cauliflower could be checked using this cloth. That's basically what we use the strip cloth for.

Rabbi Hisiger: Got it. I wanted to ask you a question that comes up very often whenever we discuss בדיקת תולעים on Let's Talk Kashrus, and in generally in the Kashrus world, this question comes up, especially from lay people, and what they ask is, you know, they say we grew up 30, 40 years ago in a frum home that had a frum mother, and in their house they ate broccoli and cauliflower and spinach and so on and so forth without such intensive checking processes, and they don't remember at least their mother engaging in these such intensive processes, and people wonder what's different? Are we frummer now? Were people not as vigilant then? Should they have been? So what could you say about what may have changed between then and now?

Rabbi Langer: Yes, that's the question that we get asked quite often. It's important to know that many years ago there was a, in the earlier days in America, there was a pesticide called DDT. DDT was a very powerful pesticide that really did get rid of the bugs from a lot of the produce that we have today. DDT became banned because it was allegedly killing out the bird population, so they banned DDT, and ever since then it's just been getting worse and worse. So it could very well be that when you're back in the home and you're growing up, when your mother was making that broccoli, so there were no bugs in the broccoli. But today, you know, today things are different. You'll say, what about before the days of America? What about in Europe? What about in Europe in those days? What did they do about it? They didn't eat vegetables then? So the answer is, if you look in the חכמת אדם, חכמת אדם tells you, he tells you, this berry from that country, stay away from it, it has bugs. This fruit from that country, and he writes, all leafy vegetables, all leafy vegetables are מלא, are filled with תולעים, and need a very, very careful בדיקה. So this is not a new thing that we're creating here in the 21st century. This is something that's been around throughout all the דורות, and people have been very careful about it. We had a short reprieve in the earlier days of America, but things are just right where they always are.

Rabbi Hisiger: Now you mentioned to me prior to this conversation, we were schmoozing a fascinating אור החיים הקדוש. I was wondering if you could share with our viewers.

Rabbi Langer: So another question that we get asked often is, you know, could it be, השם made this world filled with delicious fruit and berries and blackberries and raspberries, and what are the השגחות telling us, that it's not recommended to eat these berries, and it's not recommended to eat these fruits, these are too infested. Why did השם create it? He created it for us to eat and to enjoy. So אור החיים )שמות פרק ט״ז פסוק כ(׳ writes 350 years ago. He tells us that he asked why are their fruits and the produce in his time more infested with insects than the earlier generations, and he says that the bugs in produce come from what's called a זוהמא, the זוהמא, this poisonous אויר which is created by the עוונות of the dor, created by the sins of the generation. And the more sinful the generation is, the more produce is going to be in the vegetables. And if you look around the world today, and you see what's going on, it's quite understandable why our produce is מלא and filled with all these תולעים.

Rabbi Hisiger: And I'll just add to this conversation, which whenever we talk about the בדיקת תולעים, either I or our guest mentions, is that every single bug that a person could possibly consume is, we're talking about six לאוין, correct?

Rabbi Langer: Between four to six לאוין, depending on the type of bug.

Rabbi Hisiger: And so, you know, there's a good reason that there is such careful attention paid to the insect infestation in our foods, and why people like yourself and other experts in the area of the בדיקת תולעים are constantly working to improve the methods of checking and also education as far as the בדיקת תולעים, enabling people to check their fruits and vegetables properly. And so, we thank you for your wonderful עבודת הקודש, and we thank you for being here today.

Rabbi Langer: Thank you for having me.

 

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