An Arab farmer, Mahmoud Nadaf, grows a good part of the lettuce that the Israeli community will eat this Pesach.
A hothouse field of young lettuce
Some seventy-five dunam of lettuce in fill this sector in hothouses numbered separately with numbered subdivisions. The hothouses are specially constructed, monitored and controlled to ensure that they remain free of bugs.
Rabbi Menachem Philip is the man in charge of kashrus all year round, under the higher supervision of Rabbi Avraham Meidani who guides me through the pathways of this sector until we reach one particular row.
We note a covering atop another one constituting a very close knit network which takes every possible thing into account so that no foreign entity can penetrate, not always with perfect successes. There is a fight of life and death to unwanted invaders, and you understand that we are not talking about two-legged ones. We are battling against insects, thrips and other enemies which, the smaller they are, the more dangerous. The most feared invader is the tunnel-boring wireworm. If they get in, the whole crop goes to waste.
Morror, as per its name, should be bitter. I ask the kashrus people at my side for clarification. Rabbi Philip does not waste words but leads me between two rows, bends down to the gleaming, juicy vegetable, uproots a lettuce head and brings it close to my eyes for inspection.
The author (center) with mashgichim in a field of mature lettuce
"Their remaining in the ground during this time, together with the lack of irrigation, will cause the inner stalk to thicken; this lettuce heart will grow at the expense of the leaves which have already reached the maximum of their growth in height and will become more bitter. These already bitter lettuce heads will become even more so. Some people are more scrupulous about bitterness in morror than your average customer, and this produce is designed for them."
