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JOE REGENSTEIN: Hi. I'm Joe Regenstein. I'm a professor of food science in the Department of Food Science here at Cornell. I am also head of the Cornell Kosher Food Initiative. I'm an alum of Cornell. I have a BA in chemistry, class of '65, and a master's of science in dairy chemistry, class of '66. And we're here today at the Cornell Kosher Dining Hall, and we'd like to use the opportunity to give you an introduction to the kosher and halal food regulations of the Jewish and Muslim faiths.
Good place to start is to define the two words that we want to use today-- "kosher" which means it's fit or proper and useful in the Jewish dietary laws. And the opposite of that is "treif," or not kosher. For the Muslim community, the word is "halal," which means lawful. And the opposite of that is "haram," which means prohibited.
By way of initial clarification, a few points I'd like to make. The major point is that both kosher and halal food is not blessed. It is not the presence of a religious leader blessing the food that makes it either kosher or halal. It is a set of rules that determines its status. That is, both kosher and halal foods are prepared according to a very fixed set of rules, and it is following these rules that makes the product acceptable.
The role of the Muslim religious leader or the rabbi is simply to authenticate that the product has been made according to the rules. There is one exception to this, in that the Muslims, prior to slaughter, say a blessing over each animal as a thank you to Allah for providing the food. But, again, it is by doing the slaughter according to the law that the product becomes halal.
We're going to start by going through the kosher laws in very broad strokes. And, basically, these laws-- the kosher laws-- cover four major categories or areas that we can be concerned with. The first category is, what are the animals you are allowed to eat or use for kosher food?
Starting with the mammals, we have those animals that have a split hoof and chew the cud. That is, they have the properties of a ruminant and have a full split hoof. And this includes things like the cow, sheep, goat, deer, and, interestingly enough, the giraffe. These are the animals that people keeping kosher can use.
In addition, there are a collection of birds that can be used. These are essentially the traditional domestic birds-- the chicken, turkey, duck, and goose, but, specifically, biblically exclude the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea. So those are animals that you cannot eat as kosher.
Finally, there's the area of fish, which is my area of research. And, for fish to be kosher, or for anything from the sea to be kosher, it has to have fins and removable scales. A removable scale means that you can remove it without tearing the skin, so that, for example, the herring that I'm wearing as my tie is one of the few fish ties that I have that has the scales clearly visible. And these could be scraped off-- not from the tie, unfortunately. And the skin and fish would remain intact. And so those are the only animals that kosher-observant Jews are able to use for food.
The second set of principles we want to cover is the prohibition of blood. Blood in ancient times was considered to be the life fluid of the animal, and so its use was prohibited. In order to maximize the removal of blood and of other parts that, for one reason or another, are also prohibited, they set up a collection of post-slaughter rules and detailed instructions for slaughter.
So, first off, you start with the slaughter requirements, which require a live animal and a very special knife for the purposes of slaughter. After the animal is slaughtered, the person who did the slaughter-- the "shochet," as it's called-- actually inspects his cut to make sure that the cut was done properly and inspects his knife, both before and after.
After that, as the animal's insides are being opened, the animal is inspected internally, both while the lungs are still attached to the animal and after the lungs are removed. And they are looking specifically for lung adhesions, though they are also looking for other problems in the internal organs. And there's a special person who is trained specifically for that task.
Subsequently, usually after the meat has been cooled, it has to be deveined. Deveining, which is sometimes referred to as either "traibering" or "nikkur," is a process of removing the large arteries and veins in the meat. In addition, the forbidden fat has to be removed.
And, in principle, the sciatic nerve has to be removed to commemorate Jacob's bout with the angel. In practical terms, because deveining of the sciatic nerve is such a difficult process, people have decided that it's generally easier simply to release the hindquarter, which is where the sciatic nerve is, into the regular meat supply so that, in practical terms, almost all of the kosher ruminant meats are only the front quarter.
Once all the deveining has taken place a process of salting and soaking has to take place. Basically, the meat is soaked in cold water for about a half an hour. Subsequently, it is covered with a coarse salt, often referred to in the trade as kosher salt, and covered completely, both inside and out, in the case of chickens. If there have been cuts made in the meat, you're supposed to open the cut and put salt inside the cut.
And then it is allowed to drain for an hour. And, again, it's got to be draining such that the different pieces of meat each can independently drain, and the blood and salt liquid is removed. At the end of the hour, which is often carefully timed, the meat is rinsed three times. And then the meat is ready for whatever process is subsequently going to be used to process it.
One of the major exceptions is liver. Liver cannot be koshered this way. It has to be broiled in equipment dedicated to this purpose. Once you have gone through the koshering, from there, you can derive animal-based products that would be kosher. There is a limited amount of kosher gelatin available from kosher-slaughtered animals.
Tallows-- fat derivatives, such as emulsifiers and glycerol, could, in principle, be made from kosher animals. In practical terms, this has turned out to be way too expensive and too difficult to administer, so that, in fact, for most people practicing mainstream, normative kosher standards, other than a limited supply of kosher gelatin, animal products are not available as kosher.
The third set of Laws that we want to cover quickly this today is the separation of milk and meat. "Thou shalt not seize the kid in the milk of its mother" appears three times in the first five books of the Bible, and, therefore, is taken as a very strong and very important injunction.
That means that all products from animals are basically divided into three categories-- those that are clearly derived from milk, those that are derived from meat, and, finally a few animal products that are neither milk nor meat, the most obvious ones being eggs and honey.
And they are part of a larger group called "pareve," spelled often P-A-R-E-V-E, but there are other spellings, given that these are all transliterations from the Hebrew. The pareve products, of course, also include all of the plant-based materials.
And it is this breaking up of kosher products into three different categories that makes kosher particularly valuable to people who are not keeping kosher, because it allows for a quick screen of products to determine whether they might have meat, whether they might have milk, or whether they are free of both of those materials. And so that has helped make kosher an important marketplace consideration, in that this division allows a lot of other people to gain benefit from kosher.
Finally, there is a set of rules for a holiday that occurs in either late March or early April called Passover. It is a holiday that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt, when the Jews-- the Israelites-- left Egypt and went to Israel after 40 years in the desert, and had to leave quickly, and so their bread did not have time to rise. And so, for this holiday, a very special unleavened bread called matzo is made. However, all other uses of the five prohibited grains, which are wheat, oats, rye, barley, and spelt, are prohibited.
In the Middle Ages, the rabbis of Europe also prohibited a large number of other products that might be mistaken for these grains, so that a lot of the legumes-- things like corn and rice-- were also prohibited. And that makes producing modern food products very difficult and very challenging. And so Passover is a very specialized market, and we won't, probably, in this one hour talk-- have an opportunity to say too much more about it.
In addition, there are a collection of other laws-- what one might call minor laws-- that can have some major impacts on food production. But, again, because of time limitations, we won't be able to go into them today.
Also, now, I want to cover the major concepts in halal. The most important is the prohibition of very specific animals. Most specifically for Muslims is pork. But, again, there are a large number of other animals, particularly carnivorous animals, that are prohibited. However, symbolically, for both religions, it's the prohibition of pork that has probably become the symbol of both of these food laws, simply because pork is so readily available.
In the case of the Muslims, there is also the distinction that these laws actually extend beyond the food laws. Muslims will not wear clothing containing pork products, such as pork leather. They will not use, for example, a paint brush that has pork bristles. So, again, it's a much wider prohibition than just food.
The second concept that's very important in the Muslim community is the prohibition of drugs and intoxicants, and, specifically, the prohibition of alcohol. By alcohol, we're talking specifically about ethyl alcohol-- drinking alcohol. And this becomes important in the food industry, not just in the case of beverages, but also in the case of flavors. Things like vanilla flavor, maple flavor, lemon flavor are normally carried in an alcohol-based solution, so that, when preparing foods for halal consumers, one cannot use those ingredients.
The third concept is the prohibition of blood. This is, again, one that is much more similar to the prohibitions in kosher, and, again, lead to specific slaughter requirements that are very similar to those of kosher. On the other hand, the halal slaughter does not have any of the post-slaughter processing requirements. So the slaughter is done very similar to kosher, and then they are finished.
That basically, in a very short synopsis, covers the major concepts in both kosher and halal. And, from here, I'd like to begin to look at how do you tell that a food product is kosher or halal.
Why does a box of crackers have a small letter K surrounded by a circle discretely displayed on front? Learn about our country's two major bodies of religious law regarding the selection and preparation of food.
This video is part 1 of 7 in the Halal and Kosher series.
