Title: About Kosher and Pareve
Categories: Info Jewish
Yield: 1 Servings

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Some of the basic rules are:

The only land animals that may be eaten are those which have cloven hooves and chew cud. Pigs don't chew cud. Rabbits don't have cloven hooves. (They're given honorary cud-chewing status somehow. Don't ask me how.) People, by the way, do neither.

Sea creatures are kosher if they have both fins and scales. Certain critters, which have scales during only part of their life cycle, are the subject of some debate.

I don't know the rules for birds.

Animals, except for fish, must be slaughtered in a specific manner, which works out to the most humane manner available, given 2000 BC technology.

I don't know if the laws of kashrut say anything about the conditions in which animals are raised and housed. If I were the head rabbi, they would.

Plants are kosher.

Meat and dairy may not be consumed together, or within a certain time period of each other. I think meat is given three hours to clear the gut, and milk is given one hour, but don't quote me on that.

This is a reflection of a very interesting phenomenon, that of "building fences around the law". The specific commandment is "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk." Apparently, in that part of the world at that time, baby goat boiled in its mother's milk was a gourmet delight.

So the practice was banned.

Well, in order to avoid -=ACCIDENTALLY=- boiling a kid in its mother's milk, we now ban boiling -=ANY=- baby animal in -=ANY=- milk. Furthermore, so that no meat will ever be cooked with milk by accident, the vessels and implements used to handle milk products and meat products were kept separate.

The prohibition on eating meat or milk before the other has had time to clear the stomach must have been to prevent boiling milk and meat together in the unlikely event that someone ate both foods and then jumped into a burning building.

Oh, yes. Kashrut has a much lower tolerance for contaminants than other standards, including US FDA.

SB> say the chicken fat would make this non-kosher (at least, I'm guessing

I'm not sure about whether chicken fat is pareve or not. I know that chicken is considered meat for the purposes of combining with dairy. (Fish is not, which is why lox and cream cheese can be served together on a bagel.) Chickens don't give milk (unless the genetic engineers have been really busy lately), but they are given meat status because of the way they're killed -- by being slaughtered.

Pareve is kosher, but not all kosher foods are pareve. Due to the prohibitions on mixing meat and milk, foods are classified as meat, dairy or pareve (neither meat nor dairy). Plants, being neither meat nor dairy, are pareve.

There. You now know more about what makes something kosher than you probably ever wanted to know. :-)

From: Karl Lembke

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