Mehadrin Bus: Woman uses pepper spray when asked to move seats

Never a dull moment on those Mehadrin segregated buses...

A secular, 60 year old woman sat down in the front of a mehadrin bus in Ashdod -- in the area designated for men. A man in his twenties approached the woman and told her she was sitting in the area for men on a mehadrin bus. She promptly pulled out of her purse a canister of tear-gas and emptied its contents into the man's face.

The bus driver pulled over to the side of the road, opened all the windows, and called the police -- who detained the woman for questioning.

She told the police, "So what if its a bus full of religious people. Nothing will happen if I sit in the front of the bus."

After an investigation, the police are charging the woman with assault. She has been released on bail pending her trial. (news sources in Hebrew here and here)

Feminist hero, radical davkanik, obtuse or stupid?

Sounds like a mix of all the above.

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Freakonomics: Is Mehadrin Materna better for your baby?

I do our "major" weekly grocery shopping. As with most guys, I get a list of what to buy, and then thanks to the wonders of cellphone technology, I end up calling my wife about 5 times during the shopping adventure to verify what she meant.

Last week was no exception.

Baby formula is on the list...since my wife is nursing, this is a relatively new item, which required a question.

me: Hi, which baby formula should I buy?

her: Materna, "Shlav (phase) 1". And make sure it's not mehadrin (ultra-supervised kosher)

me: Not mehadrin!?

her: I heard that the mehadrin has less vitamins in it than the regular kashrut one.

So, I get to the baby stuff aisle and I'm wondering about why the mehadrin powdered formula has less vitamins. I find the 2 types and start comparing. Interesting. The mehadrin version has more vitamin percentages than the regular one, but not exclusively. The regular kosher version trumps the mehadrin version for some of the nutrients...albeit less than the mehadrin version.

I grab my cellphone camera and take pictures of the back label of each container. Seems to me that the mehadrin version is "healthier" -- and since it only costs a shekel more (about 25 cents), I figure why not.

Only once I got home did I do some more serious checking and copied all the values into an excel table to compare. I didn't even need to copy the values from my cellphone pics -- Materna has the data on their website.

The mehadrin version won hands down.

What's different between the mehadrin version and the non-mehadrin versions of Materna? A quick call to the Materna hotline provided the answer: the only difference between them is that mehadrin uses "Chalav Yisrael powdered milk" from Denmark, while the regular kashrut version uses Chief Rabbinate approved Chalav Stam powdered milk from Finland.

The Materna representative assured me there's no nutritional benefit of one over the other, and that the differences are all within an approved range for vitamins and minerals.

So -- just when I thought my post was ready to be posted, I did a quick image search to put a graphic of mehadrin Materna in this posting...when I came across the EXPORT versions of Materna. Guess what? They also have different nutritional values!

Export Mehadrin vs. Export Regular Kashrut.

I've had enough. For an additional 1 NIS, I'll buy the mehadrin...though I'm not convinced its any better for the baby.



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