Apart from Sofis’ link, nope. In my community we’ve never even thought about issues regarding yoghurt or cheese or things like that. I suspect it varies from community to community and person to person as to how strict they want to keep…
I also heard (just yesterday, in fact) a Muslim woman who was on the radio explaining the ins and outs of fasting, and she said that you can also “buy your way out of it” by giving money to charity (she’s Fijian Indian, if that matters). Another thing she said was that she was easing her kids into fasting, and one of them rang her in the afternoon saying he was hungry and thirsty, and she gave him the OK to have a small amount of food and water, because he’d kept to the spirit of the fast by lasting as long as he did. I gathered from her explanation that the boy was under no obligation to make up for this later in any way.
That’s surprising to me. I’m Conservative, and we’re liberal on the gelatin issue. But most of the kosher-certifying organizations seem to come down on the strict side of that issue.
I’m surprised that no one yet has mentioned that kosher wine is not halal, because of the alcohol.
The same would obviously be true of any other alcoholic drinks which happen to be kosher. What is much less obvious is the halal status of things like flavorings (vanilla extract, for example) which have an alcohol base, but the alcohol is a very tiny portion of the final product.
Another good article about Kosher and Halal is in Wikipedia, here.
Actually, this point is very disputed. I remember in particular a French very influential Imam talking for about half an hour about the issue of when Muslims could eat non-halal food when living in a non-Muslim country. He wasn’t very hot about eating non-halal and non-kosher food if finding either was a major pain (hence, doing so mostly for convenience), but didn’t overtly and definitely condemn it, either, as long as it wasn’t totally forbidden food (like pork, for instance). He didn’t agree with replacing Halal food with Kosher food as a matter of course since in his opinion Kosher food wasn’t Halal.
Just adding what I believe the main objections to be :
- Slaughtering or whatever else is done to Kosher food isn’t done the Muslim way (say, prayers to be pronounced aren’t the same, etc…)
-Control of Halal food is done by Muslims, control of Kosher food by Jews. Since there isn’t an imam behind the back of every rabbi to double check, they can’t be sure that Kosher food is actually allowed.
-Some food items (I couldn’t tell which ones) are actually Kosher but not Halal.
Children are not expected to perform at the same level as adults. I remember discussing this with some Muslim co-workers. I don’t recall all the details, but as best I remember, infants and toddlers aren’t expected to fast at all. Young children, like in elementary school, don’t have to fast although if they express an interest in doing so they would receive encouragement, and if they couldn’t handle it they would be allowed to break the fast with no penalty. As they get older the children are expected gradually put more effort into it, and they seemed to expect the late-teens kids to be able to fast as adults.
They were also clear that people with health issues (like diabetics) were not expected to fast at all. Apparently, travelers are also not held to fasting - I assume that dates back to the days when travelers might have to eat and drink when such were available on a road or trail, as well as needing to keep their strength up.
nodnod In the Somali community here opinion is similarly split, but as the community and their stores/shops have become established it’s not as much of an issue anymore.
A couple of people have told me that any non-pork meat slaughtered in a Christian/Jewish country is ok (as Christians and Jews are People of the Book), but meat in Buddhist/Hindu places isn’t.
Like any other religion there is some personal choice involved. 
In Judaism, kids don’t have to fast on Yom Kippur until they are bar/bat mitzvah age. Mr. Neville says he and his brothers did try it at least to some degree before they were bar mitzvah, though.
Fasting takes some getting used to- it’s harder than it sounds, if you haven’t done it before. I started fasting on Yom Kippur when I started seriously thinking about converting to Judaism, in 1999. I had a really hard time with it those first couple of years, but it has since gotten easier. (Of course, it probably didn’t help that Yom Kippur was very early, on September 20 that year, and that’s one of the hottest times of the year in the SF Bay Area, where I was at the time)
It’s my understanding that the rule is “If a gallon would be intoxicating, then one drop is forbidden”. I’ve never tried it, but I imagine that a gallon of vanilla extract would be more than enough to get you drunk.
In Cameroon there was a special way for children and old women to fast. I believe a light, mid-morning meal of weak millet gruel (a yummy Cameroonian staple) was allowed and they were allowed to drink water. Children pretty much decide if they want to try fasting or not and it wasn’t until the mid-teens that they were expected to really do it. Even then it seemed like my students broke fast rather casually.
I fasted two days last year. The no food part was easy, except that if you wanted to eat in the morning you had to get up at like four thirty. But the no water part was tough. Cameroon at that time of year is hot. It can easily be over 100 degrees. Doing any kind of work without plenty of water can make you really sick. Luckily nobody had jobs, so town just kind of shut down. Everyone just sat around sleeping underneath trees in front of their houses, watching the sun get higher and then lower. I can’t imagine trying to teach while fasting…
Yeah. As it was explained to me, a Muslim may eat Kosher food long before it becomes a matter of survival or anything like that, but he or she can’t do it because, say, the Jewish neighbourhood is two blocks closer than the Muslim one. It was impressed upon me that it’s really better to stay to the Halal stuff, but Kosher food isn’t the end of the world either: just don’t do it unless it would be unreasonable not to. I can see how it would be widely open to debate.
Edit: A similar rule was implied by the woman on the radio I mentioned upthread, re fasting: you can “pay off” having broken your fast by giving alms, but it’s still not the best way to go - you couldn’t have very wealthy Muslims eating all day and then just writing a cheque to the local Red Crescent at the end of it.
(I wanted to post this a few days ago, but I couldn’t remember the brand name, so I checked at the supermarket yesterday…)
I don’t dispute any of this on a general level, but it is very refreshing to note that there is at least one company which has found a way for the rabbis and imams to cooperate and work together. Namely, my local supermarket has several products made by S’Better Farms of Carson City NV, and each of these items are certified BOTH as kosher by Organized Kashruth Laboratories (their symbol is a K inside a circle) and halal by the Islamic Society Of The Washington Area (their symbol is an H inside a moon).
Jews who consider the OK to be reliable, and Muslims who consider the ISWA to be reliable can both eat these same items without any fear that corners were cut by the other religion’s supervisor.
Here are some links to their website:
cover of a box of their Beef Corn Dogs
Kosher certificate
Halal certificate
One question that I’ve heard from people several times is “What if you’re on Survivor?”
In a case like that, it wouldn’t be okay to eat obviously non-kosher food. First of all, it’s not a real “starvation” situation because there is plenty of food available. You’d just have to quit the game.
More importantly, however, no sincerely kosher Jew would have gone on the show in the first place, because a situation like this would be pretty much inevitable!
That’s good to hear. Kosher food tends to be more expensive than “regular” food,* so maybe increasing the potential market for these products could hold the costs down a bit.
Just in case anybody’s interested–another question I hear a lot is how people like college students handle kosher requirements. Many of those who aren’t especially strict about it manage by sticking to a vegetarian diet when they’re at the dining hall. You don’t have to worry about mixing milk and meat or whether the meat is kosher if you’re not eating any meat at all. The fact that college dining halls routinely offer vegetarian options these days has made this possible. (Naturally, the food wouldn’t be strictly kosher because meat and dairy are prepared with the same utensils, among other issues, but there are a lot of varieties in the way people handle kashruth.)
- By “kosher food” here, I specifically mean the sort of things one might find in the kosher section of the supermarket, not the countless ordinary pareve foods that are found throughout the supermarket and are certified kosher as a matter of course. An example would be a regular can of Goya black beans. It has the U-in-a-circle on it, which means that it has been certified by the Orthodox Union, which is one of the largest (and certainly the best known) kosher certifying agency in the U.S. See http://www.oukosher.org/ for details.
Heh. Both their certificates are out of date.