The spirit for the different rules of kashrut:
No pigs: Didn’t you see Pulp Ficiton? Pigs are dirty animals. Same goes for dogs, despite their character.
Seafood must have bones and scales: Seafood without them are bottom dwellers (read: eat feces). Don’t eat anything that eats feces. There was a big controversy a few years ago when it was discovered that swordfish/marlins have microscopic scales. Basically conservatives and moderate orthodox said they were kashrut while frum orthodox said they weren’t.
Milk and meat separate: Don’t cook a baby in its mothers milk. The odds are remote, but you never know.
So what happens to all the hind quarters of cows. I’m being serious.
No.
If memory serves me, this is a gezerah (a “fence”). Technically, fowl could be eaten with dairy, since birds don’t give milk. However, since fowl could be mistaken for meat, others might:[ul]
[li]mistakenly assume that meat and milk can be eaten together;[/li][li]mistakenly assume that person who is eating is eating forbidden food[/li][/ul]
From this site ( http://www.jewfaq.org/kashrut.htm ):
Wild Things showed his front half; I can’t say I appreciated that much.
Bacon bits are okay for observant Jews to eat if they have a hechsher on the packaging that you trust. O.U. or another such symbol.
As for mention of the parve bacon cheeseburger . . . I saw something like that once. They were gummy snacks in the shape of cheeseburgers, and they had a hechsher. Turns out it was traif after all when you look at the ingredients though . . . someone must have gotten in trouble for that one.
At the grocery store the other day, I saw what has got to be one of the most pointless products I’ve seen in my life: Kosher DAIRY hot dog buns. I mean of course there are kosher vegetarian hot dogs, so you could use them for that, but for the most part it seemed a rather pointless product to have for anyone who seriously cares enough to have noticed.
(FYI, I’m Muslim.)
Every time my extended family gets together for Thanksgiving, I find myself having the same conversation with one of my cousins: can Muslims eat Bacos? Although we have rules analogous to “keeping kosher” about the preparation of meat, we don’t have similar restrictions on non-meat products.
I have finally refined the “Bacos Conundrum” so it boils down to the age-old quandary: Does God love a thing because it is good, or it is good because God loves it?
Conversely, if God prohibits bacon, why has He done so?
I doubt the following dissertation on which Muslims might eat Bacos and which wouldn’t is of much interest to anyone except myself (and perhaps this post belonds MPSIMS), but hey:
From my own experiences, it seems many Muslims views on Bacos are reflective of their views on God in general. For example, there are those on the more dogmatic spectrum of observance. If God says “Don’t dig on swine” because He deems pigs to be inherently bad, and that therefore all intrinsic properties about the pig (including taste) are sinful, then Bacos, soybean-licious though they may be, are verboten. This person views moral pronouncements in the Quran as absolutes, however seemingly arbitrary they might seem to “logical” reasoning. (This would be the “X is good because God loves it” school.)
On the other hand, there are the more relativistic Muslims. If God has ordained or forbidden certain things, it is because He (being omniscent and all) knows better than mankind how to evaluate the usefulness of something. Therefore, since 7th Century Arabia had no Food and Drug Administration and wouldn’t know about trichonosis and the high cholesterol our porcine entrees can carry when cooked, God gave them the heads up. Therefore, the taste of bacon isn’t the problem (witness “beef bacon”, etc.), just the carrier of the flavor.
So, long story short (too late), as a Muslim, if you believe God’s word is meant literally for all occasions, no Bacos for you. If you believe it was meant literally for the original recipients but that now, the spirit of the Word is more important than the letter, shake’em on your salad to your heart’s content. Me? I don’t eat them. But then, I’m really conflicted on a lot of stuff regarding religion, so maybe you should just disregard this whole post. 
Now, Saxface, IIRC there was a similar debate among Orthodox Jews with the introduction of margarine - could they eat it with meat, even though it so closely resembles something forbidden? Ultimately, margarine’s become so widespread (as have many of those who eat it, har-har), and people so easily distinguish it from butter that it’s pretty well universally accepted (although the challenge is finding a margarine that is truly dairy-free; many contain traces of milk products for flavor).
Don’t worry about this one… Bacos do not, by any stretch of the imagination, taste remotely like anything that might ever have been within ten feet of a pig. The resemblance starts, and ends, with the name.
I asked a Jewish friend this question a while ago, and he said that only the ingredients were relevant, not the intended flavor, but then, he’s not the most observant Jew in the world, either.
I heard you can’t eat the back half because it’s too close to the anus, which means it’s too close to the butt. The meat near the rear tastes like crap anyways.
Just where do you think tenderloin comes from? Many of us Gentiles think tenderloin is just about as tasty as beef gets. The “back half” includes the thigh, from which comes some of the most expensive cuts of beef. Out here in the hinterland, where muslims and jews are a lot less common, the back half is the more desirable half of the beef. The same goes for pork. Ham specifically means the thigh. Pork shoulder is only good for being ground into something else.
On the chicken’s mother not having milk: this was a debate in the Talmud, whether birds were “meat” since the literal prohibition is focused on the mother’s milk. The decision was taken that birds are meat, fish are not. Period. So that was closed way back when.
The Torah itself rarely gives reasons for the laws, other than an occasional “to be holy to the Lord your God.” This has allowed different groups in different eras to postulate different reasons, from the health-related reasons cited above to the mystic energy cited by the kabbalists. The fact is that no reason is given, and that we are free to speculate on reasons.
Rules that were clear-cut two thousands years ago have got some fuzzy edges with modern technology (such as non-dairy cheese and soy-bacon bits), requiring reassessment. Different authorities today may reach different conclusions, and different individuals may take different decisions within the authority. Thus, an authority can allow totally vegetarian soy-bacon, but an individual can decide it’s not suitable for them.
Some people who are reasonably orthodox, for instance, will eat at non-kosher restaurants, ordering totally vegetarian, cold food like salads. There is nothing “wrong” with this, but many people will not do so, on the grounds that they may be seen by someone who won’t know the details of what they’re doing and may leap to erroneous conclusions. My house is somewhat kosher (we compromise on many things), but my rabbi won’t eat in my house, not even a banana, lest some other non-kosher congregant be offended (“The rabbi ate at Dex’s house, why not at mine?”)
Some clarification (I hope):
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The prohibition against pork etc. is only actual pork. Whatever name something has is completely irrelevant to these prohibitions.
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There is an additional Biblical commandment to “be pure in the eyes of God and man” i.e. to not do things which will seem to people like violations of the commandments. This caused some controversy when non-dairy ice cream first came out - eating it at a meat meal would give the appearance of eating dairy and meat together. (This would likely be the issue that OxyMoron refers to regarding margarine, though I don’t recall that particular case). This issue became alleviated as such ice cream became more common - once people know that ice cream is not necessarily dairy, the problem goes away.
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Beyond any specific prohibition, there is a general feeling of uneasiness with the concept of artificial bacon etc. This is because the thought is that people could really live quite well without these things, and that the fact that people are looking for artificial bacon and the like suggests that they have been influenced by the larger culture to feel that they are missing something by not eating bacon. This is not a feeling to be encouraged.
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curwin’s midrash is cited in the Talmud (Tractate Chullin). It does not exactly say that “for everything that God forbade us to eat in the Torah, there is another kosher food that tastes just like it”, but it does give some examples of this (including some non-food prohibitions as well).
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Akatsukami is correct regarding fowl and dairy.
gorewonfla:
Wrong, just like your user-name. The prohibition of using the back half of an animal is due to the presence of the sciatic nerve. Once upon a time, kosher butchers knew how to remove it completely enough so that it didn’t cause any problems, but in recent centuries, that knowledge got lost, so we discard the entire back half. Nothing at all to do with the anus.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Anecdotal support:
jdimbert and I once had a wonderful Shabbos lunch with a table full of guests. She served her famous Apple Pie for dessert; she even warmed it (in accordance with the laws of Shabbos) before serving it!
She served ice-cream with it, because what is Apple Pie unless it’s ala mode?
So, we all sat around the table making happy noises and commenting about how good this Parve ice cream was.
Then someone looked at the package… it was dairy. :o
jdimbert had assumed it was Parve since she bought it at a strictly Kosher supermarket - why would they bother selling dairy ice cream there?
Moral of the story? Be careful. The rules are there for a reason.
What does this mean?
It means that, since Kosher dairy ice cream is available at any supermarket in America (Edy’s, Briar’s, B&J’s, etc), why would a Kosher market bother to stock it? They could not hope to compete with the volume or price that larger chain-stores can provide. She assumed that they would stick with their niche: Kosher products not readily available in the general market, ie Parve ice cream, not dairy.
As it turns out, she was right, in a way. The ice cream she bought was Cholov Yisroel, a detail I didn’t mention earlier to avoid another hijack.
In various Islamic traditions, there’s a strong value placed on niyyah, or “intention”. For example, prior to praying to God, a Muslim must state his intention to do so. Similarly, during Ramadan, you must commence your fast with a statement of intent after your pre-fast meal; otherwise, you could conceivably just sleep in until noon and figure, “Oh well, might as well not eat for the rest of the day anyway.” And that would be lame.
So it boils down to something like: if you eat Bacos as a substitute for that which God has forbidden (for whatever reason He did so), then your intention is flawed and it’s unlawful. If, however, you first saw these tasty “flavored soy sprinkles” at your salad bar and cultivated a taste for them, and only later found out that they taste like bacon (in theory ), then you’re all good. Well, I doubt the Taliban would agree, but I certainly won’t hold it against you.
Whatever - I much prefer croutons.
Interesting. Actually the heimish companies manufacture just about everything these days, catering to a market that is suspicious of the reliability of the kashrus of the mass-produced non-Jewish companies. I don’t know what is available out in KC, but back east you can live your whole life without eating anything else, and many do just this.