Pork-Flavored Candy Blasted

ATLANTA, GEORGIA — [TheKnish.com] Pork-flavored goodies with names such as Trayfer Wafer, Shalom Chazer and Porky Avos are showing up on the shelves of convenience stores around the country, angering anti-treif advocates.

"It's nothing but chazer treif and that's nothing we need to be training our children to eat," said Rav Yadsil Edesboy, who has persuaded some convenience stores to stop selling the treats.

The confections are kosher, because they are made with kosher ingredients and the ovens are started up by non-gentile mashgichim at the plant. The treats impart pork's delicious taste but none of the guilt that comes from eating pork.

Merchants call them a harmless novelty and insist they advise stores to sell only to people who buy them.

"There are more than 294 million people in the United States who eat treif. We're catering to the audience of people who are in that culture," said Peter Avalaser, marketing director for Corona, California-based Swineischevitz, which uses the slogan "Land of the Frei, Home of the Treif".

An Atlanta company called Old Nevayla markets a similar product under the name Chazer-ai, which is made in the Netherlands.

The Chumradika Rav introduced a resolution condemning the candies when he saw them at convenience stores near yeshivas in his district. He plans to issue a full psak this summer.

At Food Stamped, an Atlanta grocery store, the sweets are sold near the cash register from a bucket labeled with a kashrus symbol.

"We've got probably every weird kind of candy there is in here," owner Fishel Akum said. "If it was treif we wouldn't carry it, obviously - unless business was slow."

Writer

Martin Bodek is short, dark, handsome, run marathons (finishes them too!), can solve a Rubik's Cube in 1:47, is a big TED chasid, can whup your keister in Scrabble, loves Halva, and co-founded TheKnish.com.

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