HOW TO GET KOSHER NOSH IN A RAINFOREST
How can you get kosher food in the rainforest or while visiting an ancient glacier? One expert reveals just what is involved in planning a kosher tour
For many, trying local food is an intrinsic part of travelling the world. But what if you’re strictly kosher? Once, it meant being limited to specific hotels or destinations with strong Jewish communities for their kosher restaurants and shops — or worse, lugging all your food with you and living off tinned tuna and crackers.
These days, an increasing number of kosher tours cover almost every corner of the world: you could discover the Galapagos Islands, Rwanda or Uzbekistan, all while knowing that someone else is taking care of the practicalities.
But what really goes in to planning a kosher tour? Zvi Lapian, of Zvi Lapian Tours (zvilapian.com), has been running tours around the world for over a decade, with fans including former Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — and, for Zvi, it doesn’t start with the food.
“When choosing destinations, I look for places that have a combination of different features: geographical wonders, historical sites, unique plants and animals, natural beauty, and sometimes places with interesting Jewish community history,” he explains. “It’s about what there is to see, not what there is to eat!
“My clientele wants something new: not a destination with kosher restaurants and Chabad houses where they can travel independently. They want to see different countries and experience different cultures.”
And, for today’s brand of adventurous and luxurious kosher tours, that means having your own band of experts on hand to sort the logistics, including chef and full-time mashgiach (kashrut supervisor), so no destination is off-limits. The trickiest part can be persuading local hotels that the dramatic tales they’ve heard aren’t true.
“They think that we have to blowtorch their ovens and may cause damage, when in fact we can work very effectively without radical koshering operations,” says Zvi, who says the toughest challenge at the planning stage can be persuading hotels to open up their kitchens. “We are often dealing with chefs who don’t want to share their space, concerns over liability for health and safety, and ignorance about kosher food preparation. They are nervous about what they think we might do to their equipment.”
And it’s often these special preparations — paying hotels for the use of the kitchens, for hire of a private dining room and another for services, for corkage, and also for waiting and kitchen staff — which push up the cost of kosher tours.
With local expert partners, such as high-end tour operators, helping to plan the itinerary and organise the travel, the next step is sourcing the food. It’s not only kashrut that dictates the menu with many travellers asking for vegan and coeliac-friendly diets — not to mention one woman who specified that she wouldn’t eat fish if it looked like fish, but would if she couldn’t tell.
Kosher ingredients, meat and chicken are ordered in from the nearest Jewish community, while the mashgiach and chef hit the local supermarkets for fresh produce and any other ingredients with kosher certification that they can find. The exception on Zvi’s tours are trips to Lapland, which are catered by Hermolis. And as a backup? Zvi’s suitcases aren’t all filled with clothes… “Sometimes I do get nervous that there won’t be enough food,” he says. “I often fly out with extra suitcases of packaged food from Israel or London to supplement what is available locally. In fact, I tend to over-cater, so we have never gone hungry!”
With the tour planned and the
food sorted, there are preparations for Shabbat to organise, too. “I bring a mini Sefer Torah with us and I won’t travel unless we have a minyan of men for services, particularly since we often have travellers who want to say
Kaddish,” says Zvi, ensuring they’re self-sufficient on Shabbat. For some destinations, such as Lima in Peru or Beijing in China, spending Shabbat in the city with the Jewish community is a bonus of joining a kosher tour.
With so much planning involved, it’s not surprising that popular destinations get repeated regularly — some yearly or every other year, while Pesach trips to Israel are often booked by the same families every year.
If you think some of the world’s wildest destinations would still be off-limits, you’d be wrong. How about keeping kosher with the penguins? Why not, says Zvi. “The places on my personal wish-list include Antarctica, Tanzania and the Serengeti, and South Korea and Taiwan. I’m willing to run tours to these places, but it remains to be seen whether people are adventurous enough to join me!”