Some Rabbis approve lab-grown meat for cheeseburgers
No need to worry that people will think you’re not keeping kosher, say these rabbis.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A group of Israeli rabbis published a position paper this past
weekend stating that certain lab-grown meat is not considered “real”
meat and therefore may be cooked and eaten with milk.
The group of national-religious clerics includes Rabbi David Stav,
head of the moderate Orthodox Tzohar rabbinic organization, and Rabbi
Yuval Cherlow, his fellow dean at the Petach Tikva hesder yeshiva, which
combines army service with Torah study.
Two leading kashruth supervisors, Tzohar kashruth division chief
Rabbi Oren Duvdevani and Rabbi Ze’ev Whitman of Tnuva, one of Israel’s
largest dairy corporations, also signed onto the paper.
They clarified that they were not addressing processes that involve
taking cells from live animals and cultivating them, which gives rise to
a host of kashruth issues that divides rabbis to this day. They were
only considering the newest methods of production based on cells that
they said are not considered meat according to Jewish law, such as
pre-embryonic cells taken from a fertilized egg or a cow.
Jewish law, they wrote, determined long ago that a fertilized chicken
egg is “pareve” – it can be eaten with either milk or meat. This, even
though all birds are considered a type of animal meat, as discussed in
the Talmud some 2,000 years ago.
Based on this ruling, the Tzohar rabbis wrote that products based on
cows’ “pre-embryonic cells and grown on a plant-based medium also have a
‘kosher pareve’ status, even if the cells are identical in both their
composition and properties, to fat or muscle cells” of a real animal.
In this case, they dismissed one of the biggest problems that discourage rabbis from approving certain products, such as simulated
pork, although there was no issue when it came to certifying pareve “hot
dogs” and “hamburgers” made from soy products.
Last September, the Orthodox Union (OU) refused to certify as kosher a plant-based product called Impossible Pork. The world’s largest kashruth certifier said that its rejection was solely due to “consumer sensitivities” with regard to pork.
“I cannot speak for the OU, but the issue seems to be connected to
the labeling,” world-renowned Torah scholar Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz
told World Israel News at the time.
“Pork is so-identified as the sign of traif, as a betrayal of Jewish commitment to kashrut, that giving a hashgacha
[rabbinic approval] even on fake pork is like coming to synagogue
wearing a swastika tie. It is a public identification with that which is
deemed repulsive in the eyes of the Torah,” he said.
The OU noted that it did approve the same producer’s Impossible
Burger as well as certain brands of artificial crab and similar
simulated foods.
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