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Tough Topics - Kashrut
The popular expression, 'You are what you eat' generally means that an individual's identity affects what they eat and is affected by it in return. That is why national dishes are such an important aspect of a country's culture.
By what they eat—and especially by what they will not eat—Jews are reminded at every meal of their group identity and their divine destiny. Food serves as such a basic statement because eating is usually a daily activity common to all.
As Jews have been widely dispersed throughout the world, there is considerable regional variation in their food; for example, Indian Jews are much more likely than Jews in Argentina to eat curry and chapattis. Some foods, such as matzah and hallah, are what might be called 'required eating' throughout the Jewish world but there are very few universal Jewish dishes and there is actually no such thing as 'Jewish food'. Indeed, Jewish food is defined by what Jews may not eat, the system known as kashrut; 'kasher' means 'fit', 'proper' or 'acceptable'.
Kashrut is commonly known as forbidding pork but it is much deeper and more complex than that. Foods are kasher (or kosher) that are thought of as fit for Jews to eat; and tref (or trefa) if they are not. ‘Tref’ does not mean unclean or unhealthy and there is no reason why non-Jews should not eat trefa foods.
There are two factors that differentiate kashrut from other cultural food systems:
- First, it raises eating to the level of holiness and adds to personal likes and dislikes the idea of God’s will. Thus, cooking and eating according to kashrut is an important mitzvah, a divine command. People who do not understand kashrut try to explain it in terms of the physical and social conditions in the wilderness wanderings (about 1200 BCE) when the food laws were first given. They might say, for example, that shellfish were forbidden because they decompose quickly in hot weather and birds of prey because they were believed to have special powers. There is actually no way of knowing whether this was true but what we can say for certain is that they are not the reasons why Jews 'keep kosher' today: those Jews who do observe kashrut do so because it has become a traditional part of Jewish life and because they believe it to be God's law for the Jews.
- The second distinctive feature of kashrut—and the greatest advantage of it—is that it is simple and systematic. Basically, kashrut is a formula that can be applied by anyone to any food, anywhere and at any time.
Processed food
Modern food manufacture involves a large number of ingredients (including additives), some of which might not be kosher even though the basic food is itself kosher. For example:
- Confectionery made from chocolate, sugar, nuts and dried fruit (all of which are kosher) might also contain gelatine (which, probably made from animal products, is not kosher): the gelatine thus renders the confectionery not kosher.
- Some foods that are in themselves, kosher are processed alongside foods that are not kosher or use the same equipment. This might mean that traces of the non-kosher food enter the kosher food, making it non-kosher. (This is similar to the phenomenon of traces of nuts entering food that is not meant to contain nuts—hence the warning on some packets.)
There are numerous such examples and they are growing in number as manufacture becomes more complex and new products come on to the market.
Observant Jews deal with this complexity and potential confusion by consulting a kashrut guide when shopping for food. Lists of kosher and non-kosher manufactured foods are published in handy pocket-sized booklets and also posted on the Internet. Rabbis or other authorities compile these lists after visiting factories and food-processing plants (including many ‘household names’). They do not watch every single chocolate bar being produced but they do enquire into the source of ingredients and the other uses to which the equipment is put, and they observe the process of food manufacture. Food producers cooperate with these visits because they hope that their products will be shown to be kosher: getting on to the list means that their sales to Jews might increase.