3/19: Other white meat

[richlevy]

Originally posted by alphageek31337
I never understood the concept of kosher meat in the modern day and age. As Chris Rock put it, "In those days, they didn't have nothin' to keep pig meat from killin' a man. These days, a porkchop is your friend."

Ah well, chalk one more up under the "Religious Customs that Once Made Sense" coloumn. I think we'll put this one right next to human sacrifices to the sun (hey, they made sense at the time too....either bobby dies or it gets fuckin' cold).

My $.50 (gotta account for inflation)

Steve

Some of it relates to health. Some of it to humaneness (is that a word), and some of it seems strange.

For example, there is a commandment against boling a kid in its mother's milk. This is thought to be one of the reasons for the prohibition against mixing milk with meat. Others claim that the prohibition was meant literally and that some other religion actually did this.

Now it could be claimed that it is possible to confuse red meats and therefore you run the risk of in some way mixing a mothers milk with the meat of its child, so this maybe means that you cannot mix lamb with cow's milk, but fowl is considered a meat also, and there is zero chance of mixing a chicken with it's mother's milk.

Our former reform rabbi was comfortable eating chicken cheese steaks.

Another issue is the humaneness of the kill. Kosher killing is intended to be as quick and painless as possible. Compare this to the methods employed by meat packers.

Kosher does generally mean cleaner. Kosher meat cannot be made from visibly unhealthy animals. Also, kosher meat is probably less susceptible to BSE (mad cow disease) becuase kosher means that more care is taken to keep out un-kosher parts (spine and brain) that pass along the disease.

Restricting red meat to animals which have cloven hooves and chew their cud might have been a way to keep from eating carrion eaters. It wasn't until the recent use of bone meal that there was even a chance that cows would eat dead animals. Cud-chewing animals were better vegetarians which was and is probably safer.

Being Kosher did partially save Jewish communities from plaques caused by trichinosis in pigs. I say partially because the surrounding non-Jewish communities got extremely ticked off when they noticed that the Jews were not affected.

All in all, Kosher might be coming back in style. There is already anecdotal evidence of non-Jews ordering Kosher meals on airlines. With BSE and foot-and-mouth, it could be on the rise.