Dear Chaim,
As you know, I just got back from Antwerp. You were right-in-flight kosher meals are really okay. Dinner was beef something-or-other and it made me a little sleepy. I had a nice nap, but I woke up hungry. I remembered the chocolate bar in my bag. Then I saw that the ingredients included cocoa butter-and I’d just had meat! Six hours between meat and milk, right? I looked again: The wrapper said “Kosher Pareve.”1 Pareve butter?
My nephew picked me up at the airport. I asked him to stop for a bite. “Share my Elvis sandwich,” he says. “It’s the vegan version. Strictly kosher.” It was, um, interesting. White bread (“kosher organic,” he tells me), ketchup, mayo, peanut butter, and…BACON!?! “Take it easy, Uncle B.,” he reassures me. “Lightlife Smart Bacon. It’s OK pareve. It’s even vegan.” Kosher vegan bacon?
My kids were excited to see me: “Mommy just made pizza!” I was safe-it had been six hours since dinner. Susan set my plate down with a shaker of grated cheese. Kosher Romano, very nice. I sprinkled some on my pizza, but it tasted funny, like…CHICKEN!?! “I mixed chicken-flavored soup powder in the cheese,” she said. “I call it Chicken Romano. Relax, it’s pareve. Honestly, don’t you trust me?” Kosher Chicken Romano?
So I got busy on Google. I found out that “cocoa butter” comes from cocoa beans. The “butter” is the stuff that’s separated during processing from the cocoa liquor.
Smart Bacon? Mostly soy flour. And Susan’s chicken-flavored soup powder has all vegetarian ingredients. So I can see why they’re all pareve. But still it seems wrong. The Torah says we shouldn’t eat meat with milk, right? But if it looks like bacon and tastes like bacon, then eating it should be wrong. I mean, if you keep kosher, then you shouldn’t even want food that isn’t kosher! Obviously, some people don’t really want to keep kosher!
I told this to my rabbi. His response surprised me. “It’s like decaffeinated coffee,” he said. “I like coffee, but the doctor says caffeine is bad for my health. So I drink decaf. It tastes the same, and the doctor has no objection. Smart Bacon, soy pepperoni pizza, and other kosher imitations of non-kosher foods are the same. G-d-the all-knowing ‘doctor’-tells us that non-kosher foods are bad for our spiritual health, so we don’t eat them. But He doesn’t say that we should not want to eat those things, or that we would not like them if we did. We just can’t eat them, because they are spiritually unhealthy.
“It’s all about spiritual purpose,” he continued. “What we eat affects everything we do, because it fuels our lives. Eating kosher transforms our physical fuel into a sacred tool. It ensures that everything we do is powered by a Divinely approved energy source.
“So much logic and science goes into kosher living, sometimes we forget that its source is Divine. Why not mix meat and milk? It’s a mystery, for now. But G-d doesn’t begrudge us the pleasure of a good taste. The wife of Rav Nachman once said that for everything the Torah prohibits, it permits something else. Can’t have pork? Try Shibuta-fish brains, she said. Babylonian delicacy, I guess.”
But somehow, I told him, it looks wrong.
“Ah,” he said, “that can be a problem sometimes, and the sages foresaw that, too. People used almond milk as a ‘cream’ sauce on meat, and the rabbis ruled that they had to add some almonds so that everyone would know what they were serving. Did you notice the little plastic containers of ‘non-dairy creamer’ with the coffee at my daughter’s wedding? We didn’t want anyone to mistake it for milk after the meat meal.”
Aha! So my wife should have brought out the chicken soup package with the Romano cheese! “Don’t you trust your wife?” he asked. (That’s just what she said!) “Anyway, the rabbis do. You keep kosher and you know that she does, too. At home, we don’t worry about appearances, because we know.”
Warm wishes,
Berni
1. The word “pareve” refers to those foods that are neither meat nor dairy.