Inspired by this thread. (Well, okay indirectly: I read the question & 2nd post to my sister, which led to a discussion of Hindus and cows, which led to a discussion of Muslims and pork, which led to a discussion of Jews and pork, which led to a discussion of Jews and cheeseburgers, which led to the story below.)
My sister has a friend who is Jewish (well, more than one, but this story is only about one). When she ate dinner with her friend, who I’ll call Lisa (because that’s her name), Lisa would eat her meal–including meat–and then excuse herself from the table, leave the dining room to go into the kitchen, pour a glass of milk, walk to the living room and then drink the milk. While having the parenthetical discussion detailed above, she wondered if that was exactly kosher (in both senses of the word) or if it were just an elaborate but meaningless attempt at circumvention.
I told her I didn’t know, but I could ask.
(Which led to a discussion of the Jewish Sabbath…)
No, if you’re keeping kosher, it’s not enough to just have a glass of milk in a different room from where you ate meat to make it ok. You have to wait a certain amount of time after eating meat before you drink milk.
Of course, not everybody keeps kosher strictly. But, no, that’s not generally considered acceptable.
Yup. Two sets of dishes, two sets of pots and pans, two refrigerators, two freezers…
In fact, the Asbell Center at Dickinson College has two separate kitchens. Not just sets of plates, but two entire separate kitchens. I’ve eaten there, and when we cleaned up, we had to be careful to go into the right kitchen. IIRC, we had pasta with cheese, so we had to make sure we went into the dairy kitchen, and not the meat kitchen.
Bear in mind that most of these principles are rabbinic rather than Biblical. The latter proscription is fairly narrow and precise, viz, not to seethe a kid (goat) in the milk of its mother. This was later interpreted/extended to a complex set of rules of what meats and dairy may be combined, in what ways, and/or separated by what barriers (mainly time ones). One can be Jewish (I’m not, btw, but used to live with someone who was), one can even consider oneself to be keeping kosher, without following ALL the rabbinic guidelines.
Depends which subset of Americna Jews. My family is not terribly observant, and nobody keeps kosher any more, but on the other hand, my grandmother won’t eat pork (though she happily eats shellfish, and is in a state of denial about the barbecued meat floating in the wonton soup at Chinese restaurants). For that matter, even families that don’t keep kosher at all are unlikely to serve pork or mix milk and meat on Jeiwsh holidays, if they observe them. The vast majority of American Jews do not keep strict kosher.
However, when I was a kid, Mom sent us to day camp at the Jewish Community Center in the summers, and they had two separate kitchens. Once we had our weekly Friday Shabbat cookout there, rather than in the forest preserve, when it rained - the counselors didn’t know any better, and we messed up and used the wrong kitchen to cook the hamburgers. The administration was NOT happy - re-koshering a kitchen is a huge PITA.
Actually, separate commercial kitchens makes way more sense than separate fridges or freezers. You need separate food preparation implements for milk and meat: bowls, knives, silverware, can openers, etc. (Glass can be used for either.) On the other hand, there’s no reason you can’t STORE milk and meat together; they don’t absorb milkitude or meatiness from each other just from being next to each other. So in a commercial kitchen, if there’s space, comsidering the volume of food being prepared, it might be simpler to have two separate kitchens than to risk using the wrong utensils and screwing up sloppy joes for 500 (and the pots and sppons) because it was made non-kosher.
I know a lot of US Jews who use the same fridge and plates but separate meat and milk by meal. Not kosher in the rabbinic sense, but an attempt at kashrut in a “newer” observant community.
A public establishment that wants people who keep kosher to patronize it should get kosher certification. The requirements for certification vary by the certifying organization and its degress of strictness. Most will do some sort of inspection, I’d imagine, as well as making sure the cooking/food preparation is done in a proper manner and that all the food products and ingredients used are kosher. Depending on the kind of establishment, you might have an on-site mashgiach, whose job it would be to monitor what’s going on and make sure it’s in line. Another option is to have someone do unscheduled drop-in visits, like a health inspector.
A student of mine was a counselor at a Jewish summer camp this summer, and she said when they served hamburgers the first night, it was to a universal chorus of “where’s the cheese?”
Even though I teach in an area with a fairly large Jewish population, I’ve yet to have a student who would only eat in kosher establishments–it’s more a sense of “personal” kosher-i.e., they will eat pizza from Papa Johns, but not with meat. I have found that many of my students who keep a degree of kosher just identify as “vegetarian” publically. It’s simpler to explain, and they don’t feel like they are losing out on much. It’s possible that if there were more kosher establishments around here, it would be more common to have kids restrict themselves to that option. It may also be that the more strictly orthodox kids are more likely to be in private school, as it’s hard to be strictly orthodox in a public school setting.
In my understanding, glass can be used for meat or milk cold foods. Cookware, or any other glass used under heat, cannot be swapped. I’m going to have to go check Shulhan Aruh to make sure… I know it’s in there somewhere, but I can’t find it at the moment.
The waiting period after eating meat before eating milk varies by tradition, from 1 hour to 6 hours. (My upbringing / choice is 1.5 hours.) Certain dairy foods (I believe cheese is one) require the same waiting period.
Maybe not, but there seems to be a tradition anyway. I had a girlfriend who was not Jewish but was raised in a Jewish neighborhood. We stopped in a supermarket to pick up some coldcuts for a picnic and were looking in the deli case. After picking out some sliced salami she started looking left and right, obviously searching for something some distance away.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“The cheese.”
“It’s right here,” pointing about two feet down from where we’d just picked up the salami.
She laughed and said she was used to the meat and cheese being kept in separate cases.
Separate refrigerators for milk and meat are not all that common in Orthodox Jewish homes.
Separate sets of dishes and silverware, definitely. Separate sinks, stoves, and microwaves, frequently, though one can make do with one each. Dishwashers must be separate…if you only have one (as my family does), it can’t be used for both.
As someone mentioned, on a large scale, separate refrigerators may make sense, but they’re not common in homes.
And the moving into another room thing is totally not kosher. There’s a period of time one must wait between eating meat and milk. It varies according to ancestral custom, but is somewhere between an hour (Dutch Jews) and six hours (most Eastern European Jews).
However, it is possible that if “Lisa” didn’t actually eat the meat but just sat amongst the meat-eaters, she might leave the room to drink some milk, because a kosher-observant family would not have the milk and meat on the table at the same time.
Possibly the funniest kosherism I ever read was an assertion in a cookbook that it was okay to wash meat and dairy dishes in a dishwasher at the same time so long as they were on separate racks. Obviously this makes no sense at all. But it was stated with complete confidence. I still chuckle.
Perhaps they meant that one could use the same sink for milk and meat dishes (thought not together), provided that one had a different rack (to hold the dishes off the sink bottom) for each type?