Roughly 2 percent of Americans are Jewish, and only a small fraction of them keep kosher. Yet between one-third and one-half of all packaged food in an American supermarket has a kosher label on it. How did kosher law become big business? Join us this episode as we find out how ancient Jewish dietary laws have shaped and been shaped by the science of processed food, from Coca-Cola to Jell-O and beyond.

The definition of "kosher" is simple: It means "fit and proper." But deciding which foods are kosher for Jews to eat is anything but straightforward. Following a handful of basic statements in the Torah (the five books of Moses), such as which animals are unclean, rabbis have spent thousands of years and written millions of words arguing about such questions as whether honey is kosher, despite the forbidden bee legs that accidentally get caught in it, or how long to wait after eating meat before consuming milk.

For Roger Horowitz, author of the new book Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food, these debates were personal: His own family was split on the vexed question of whether sturgeon was fit and proper. (In short: Under Jewish law, only fish with fins and scales are kosher. Sturgeon seem to have scales, but they are so deeply embedded in the fish's flesh that scraping them off with a knife is impossible—so do they still count as scales? Jews have debated this question for more than a millennium.)