My Dilemma in the Produce Aisle

This article is brought to you by the editorial team of JLI’s Living Jewish series, which has recently released The Complete Guide to Keeping Kosher as previously reported on COLlive.

I’m in Shoprite looking for a quick snack when I spot a precut fruit cup. Pineapple, watermelon, cantaloupe, sliced apples; everything’s kosher—it’s just fruit, right? But then it hits me: This isn’t a kosher store. If the knife they used to slice it was previously used to cut hot nonkosher food, doesn’t that make the fruit treif?

To sharpen the question, let’s clarify that this could only cause reason for concern with certain fruits that are halachically classified as davar charif—a sharp food. Acidic fruits like pineapples and citrus fruits fall into this category. Sharp foods have a unique halachic property: They draw out absorbed flavor from the knife that cuts them, even when both the knife and the food are cold. So a pineapple cut with a knife that has cut hot treif food could absorb that nonkosher taste.

So is the fruit cup off-limits?

The short answer: you can buy it.

According to major kashrus agencies, it is permissible to buy cut-up fruit—even davar charif fruit like pineapple, and certainly non-sharp fruits like watermelon—from a nonkosher grocery store. The reason is that we can safely assume that the store uses dedicated knives for cutting fruit that have never been used to cut hot nonkosher food. Grocery store produce departments generally keep their fruit knives separate from anything used in the deli or prepared foods section. Even where there is some theoretical doubt about the circumstances, the halachah allows us to rely on this assumption.

What about the dishwasher?

You might wonder: Even if the knives are dedicated to fruit, don’t they get washed together with the rest of the store’s nonkosher utensils?

In practice, dedicated fruit knives are usually not washed together with other dishes. But even if they were, it’s uncertain whether the washing process would actually render them nonkosher. While this reasoning alone wouldn’t be enough to permit the fruit, it works as an additional supporting factor on top of the other reasons for leniency.

That said, if you know for a fact that a particular store washes its fruit knives together with nonkosher utensils or uses the same knives for other foods, (as is often the case in smaller bodegas or mom-and-pop stores), you should not buy cut fruit from that store.

Can I get salad too?

No. The permissibility of cut-up fruit does not extend to salad bars, and certainly not to salads from a nonkosher restaurant. There are two problems there. First, most salad vegetables need to be checked for insects, which is virtually impossible once the greens are already cut up and mixed. Second, salad bars are surrounded by nonkosher dressings and condiments, handled with shared utensils, and exposed to constant cross contamination. The entire salad bar area and everything in it should be treated as nonkosher.

The first volume of Living Jewish, The Complete Guide to Keeping Kosher, is available now at Hamafitz and Judaica World.