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Anyone else live in an area where there are no other Jews, and no groups within easy traveling distance?

If so, how do you maintain Jewish practices (including eating kosher)?

I live near lots of Jews, so I have no real opinion xD

Heh. I know what you mean about the kosher section. Where I go to college they have kosher deserts and matzo, and only for Passover. My college doesn't even offer Kosher, and we're required (for at least a year) to buy their meal plan.

By the way, my weakness to kosher is sea food. Grew up on the east coast, eating lobster, shrimp, clams, and all manner of tasty non-kosher food.

My family is pretty secular, bordering on atheist, with beliefs that are more agnostic than anything. My parents laughed when I asked for them to buy kosher food. So there's no help from my family.

Oh my gosh! Don't even get me started on my love of Crab and Shrimp and other delicious bottom feeders. I rarely eat them, but they're so good.

Right now I've started on pork. It's the easiest, so I started with it first. Then I'll move to meat/cheese, and finally bottom feeders. I think I can do it, especially once I move somewhere better than here.

I do forget that the health food stores offer much more kosher items than the devil. (Wal Mart)

I had pork once before my conversion.

I could not stop vomiting. Seriously.

In retrospect, I think that was my inner Jew screaming for me to NEVER touch that nasty stuff again!

Oh! Hey OP! I found a Kosher food site that delivers nationwide. I'm not sure if it's in your price range or whatever, but it's worth looking at...

http://www.parkeastkosher.com

well i'm in the military and there aren't vary many Jews in the Air Force. there were a lot of people who had never seen a Jewish person before they met me. so you can imagen the problems i have.

I live in a big city with a metric ###-load of Jews, but I often visit my mother in a small, not-very-Jewish town far to the west of here, or my other relatives in a tiny little place in the middle of an entire STATE that is classified as the middle of nowhere. In those places, it's hard to find anyone who knows what kosher even means, let alone find a section of a store devoted to kosher items.

However, you CAN find kosher foods there. Kellogg's cereals that have a plain K on the packaging are reliably kosher (they're one of the very few companies in the world in which the plain K actually means anything; most companies just put it on there, without having any idea what it means). Del Monte canned vegetables with the Triangle K are reliably kosher. Fresh-frozen vegetables with no "seasonings" or "flavorings" or sauces are acceptable to use. Starkist, Bumblebee, and other brands of canned salmon or tuna are usually marked with the OU (bit U inside a circle), which means they're kosher.

Weight Watchers puts out breads, bagels, muffins, and little snack cakes that are all kosher dairy. It's hard to find breads that are kosher, if there's no kosher bakery, but the Weight Watchers breads are fine.

According to most authorities, Minhag Amerika (the custom for North America, outside Mexico) is that plain milk (not chocolate or other flavored; not ice cream or yogurt; not buttermilk, for some reason; just plain ordinary drinking milk) is perfectly acceptable. However, if you want to be strict about chalav Yisrael (having milk that has been watched/supervised by a kosher authority from milking to market), look for "chalav Yisrael" on the label. It may appear in Hebrew; someone with a Hebrew font on their computer, please show people what this looks like.

Juices that are 100% juice -- no sweeteners, no additional flavorings -- and do not contain grape, grapefruit, prune, or tomato, are acceptable, though if you can find juice with a hechsher on it, that's preferred.

The world is full of kosher foods. It's just that they're also "mainstream" foods, so people don't think of them as kosher. Your cabinet probably has a lot of kosher foods already in it. Go through them and see for yourself. Look for a hechsher (a symbol of a reliable kashrut agency) on the label. You can find the reliable hechsherim here:

http://crcweb.org/kosher/consumer/Agency_List.html
or here:

http://www.kashrusmagazine.com

True, it's very hard to find kosher meats and cheeses, the further you get from large Jewish populations. But if there's even one synagogue anywhere near you, phone them up and ask them if they can order them for you. They'll usually be thrilled to do so. They'll probably also have some other congregants who also want those things. I bring a cooler full of those things for myself when I visit places I don't know, but you may have to drive (or get someone to drive you) to the synagogue to pick up kosher meats such as Empire or Aaron's, and kosher cheeses such as HaOlam and Miller's, once the synagogue has ordered them and has let you know that they've arrived. Order a lot; bring a cooler; stick it all in the freezer until you need it. They'll keep indefinitely.