After this past Easter Sunday, I thought this might be an interesting topic for discussion given the fact that most of the Abrahamic religions on the planet have some form of dietary restrictions occurring this month. For Islam, we are currently in the month of Ramadan where Muslims fast from dawn to sunset. Judaism has the customs of Passover. Many Catholics just spent Good Friday abstaining from meat as part of Lent fasting rules.
Interesting to note, in the 17th century the Catholic Church declared that beavers were technically not considered meat because they lived most of their lives in water, making them closer to fish (which is not considered meat for Church doctrine). This same principle of land animals being considered meat, and aquatic-based animals being “fish” is applied to both capybara (a large rodent that can best be described as a giant guinea pig) and alligators, as technically consumption of either circumvents the meat restriction as well.
On the other side of things, there is a principle called “Marit ayin” within Jewish religious law. To describe it succinctly, even if something is not technically prohibited, it can become prohibited if the consumption of a food is confusing to other Jews and gives the appearance of violating chametz foods (i.e., foods with leavening agents that are forbidden for Passover). It’s for this reason the world’s largest kosher certifier, the Orthodox Union, refused to certify impossible pork, even though the product’s ingredients was plant-based and contained nothing from a pig. This would presumably also apply to the idea of grown laboratory meat where meat is grown from an animal’s stem cells without slaughtering or harming the source.
If all of this sounds incredibly arbitrarily and like we’re dancing on the head of a pin, the impetus for thinking about this was the latest season of Star Trek: Picard and the idea with Trek’s replicator. It’s been a staple of Star Trek technology over the past 30 years, but It’s a good thought experiment and creates huge implications for something like this concept.
This topic was spurred by watching the current season of Star Trek: Picard (which is amaze balls by the way) and some speculation about Worf’s (Michael Dorn) childhood. It is canon within the franchise that Worf was raised on Earth by adopted parents, and those parents did their best to make sure Worf was allowed to understand his Klingon heritage. To that end, his adopted parents even took the step of cooking Klingon cuisine, including Rokeg blood pie.
Nerds being nerds with a tendency to overthink stuff, since the actors portraying Worf’s parents (Theodore Bikel and Georgia Brown) were Jewish, it’s assumed that Worf was raised by Eastern European/Russian Jews. However, that brings up the question of, if Worf’s parents were Jewish whether it’s possible to cook Klingon blood pie and it still be kosher?
There are two possible answers:
- Gene Roddenberry intended for Star Trek to be a fictional universe where organized religion has died out on Earth by the 24th century. So there would be no worrying about whether anything was kosher or halal, or whether something is or isn’t meat for a Friday meal, because there are no priests or rabbis left on Earth to worry about it.
- Even though Roddenberry intended a secular-humanist society, there have been hints on the show that personal faith still exists among certain characters, and maybe small segments of the population still follow certain customs (e.g., the original Enterprise had a chapel, Kassidy Yates mentioned that she preferred being married by a priest to Captain Sisko, etc.) which might indicate that something like the replicator makes all of these arguments about halal/kosher food obsolete.
Within the Stat Trek universe, the use of replicators allows the Federation to fabricate objects and food by converting energy into matter using something similar to the transporter’s technology. That brings up a really interesting question of whether replicated pork would be halal/kosher, since the computer didn’t use a pig to create the food, so it’s not real pork, and the preparation consisted of a pattern being formed atom-by-atom and molecule-by-molecule.
However, we would get into an argument about whether it’s more important to abide by the letter of the law or the spirit of the law. Also, whether vegans and vegetarians, would accept something like this would also be an open question, since even the introduction of meat-substitutes has led to controversy within those communities.
So we don’t have to wait till the 23rd and 24th centuries and our own personal food replicators to get into these arguments, since the advent of lab-grown meat and plant-based “impossible” meat substitutes become more common.
From Jacob Gurvis at The Times of Israel:
The largest and most influential certifier of kosher products in the world has declined to endorse Impossible Pork, even though nothing about its ingredients or preparation conflicts with Jewish dietary laws.
“The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an ‘OU’ to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division. “It may indeed be completely in terms of its ingredients: If it’s completely plant-derived, it’s kosher. Just in terms of sensitivities to the consumer … it didn’t get it.”
Genack said he and others at the OU recalled what happened when they once certified “bacon” that wasn’t made of pig.
“We still get deluged with calls from consumers who either don’t get it or they’re uncomfortable with it,” he said.