David Mintz, the Pioneer of Nondairy Ice Cream Who Changed the Lives of Kosher Consumers

March 3 2021

Because the laws of kashrut forbid consuming meat and dairy at the same meal, a lunch of a hamburger, for instance, cannot be followed by a dessert of ice cream. In the early 1980s, David Mintz solved this problem by selling a soy-based ice cream called Tofutti, the first such product to appear on the American market—paving the way for today’s abundance of faux-dairy foods. Mintz died last week at the age of eighty-nine. Hugh Merwin tells his story:

Mintz was born June 8, 1931, the son of a Williamsburg bread baker, and grew up in the neighborhood’s Orthodox Jewish community. After a brief stint selling mink stoles, he opened shops that sold prepared foods. One ingenious ploy involved Mintz’s promotion of the Jewish grandmothers he’d recruited in place of line cooks to prepare the most comforting foods: stuffed cabbage, fat knishes, perfectly rolled rugelach. The babushka strategy attracted long lines, Orthodox and not. “Finally I had to hire one grandma, a grandma foreman, to manage all the other grandmas,” Mintz told the New York Times.

David Mintz’s life changed in 1972, in a basement kitchen in Chinatown, where cooks transformed fresh soy milk into soft tofu for neighborhood dim sum parlors. . . . It took Mintz a decade to reverse engineer the taste and mouthfeel of various dairy ingredients that are forbidden, by Jewish law, to be served together with meat. He eventually learned that tofu could emulate the sour cream he felt should be dolloped on beef stroganoff, for example. Tofu emulsified with vegetable oil and alfalfa honey took on a butter-fatty texture and became the parve key to an ice-cream alternative that could triumphantly close out a fleyshik [meat] meal.

The market for Tofutti may have started with observant Jews—Mintz even sought guidance from Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the venerated Orthodox Jewish leader—but it soon expanded to include the lactose intolerant, fad dieters, suburban vegetarians, and parents anxious to get their kids to eat plants on the sly. Early Tofutti flavors like carrot-raisin-apple, a riff on the Rosh Hashanah side dish tzimmes, also gave way to more serviceable chocolate and vanilla flavors, plus wildberry and banana-pecan.

Read more at Grub Street

More about: American Jewry, Food, Judaism, Kashrut, Menachem Mendel Schneerson

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy