Which is something entirely different than keeping a kosher kitchen at home. Most kosher restaurants, in fact, serve either meat or dairy, but not both.
People keep kosher in all sorts of different ways- it ranges from not eating obvious pork products (and, for some, there’s an exception for Chinese restaurants) to having two separate kitchens.
Mr Neville and I are Conservative, and we do the following:
[ul]
[li]Kosher-certified meat only[/li][li]We’ll buy non-kosher-certified things that don’t have meat (excluding fish) in them, after reading the label and figuring there’s nothing that isn’t OK.[/li][li]Two sets of dishes and utensils[/li][li]But we will use glass cooking pans for either- they just have to be washed in between.[/li][li]We keep meat and dairy dishes in separate sinks (we have a double sink), though it’s not always the same sink for each- we have metal sinks, and our rabbi said you don’t have to do that with metal sinks[/li][li]We do both meat and dairy dishes in the dishwasher, but not together. Some people will run the dishwasher empty between meat and dairy loads, but we don’t.[/li][li]There’s no waiting period after having dairy before you can have meat (though they shouldn’t be part of the same meal- maybe that’s why Lisa wouldn’t drink milk at the table?). For us, that applies to all dairy products, including cheese.[/li][li]We wait one hour after eating meat before having dairy.[/li][li]At restaurants or someone else’s home, we do what Manda JO said the Jews she knows do. We’ll eat vegetarian food and dishes that contain only fish that we know are kosher, but no meat or poultry. Usually, we’ll ask for vegetarian food- most people know what that is, but they probably don’t know which fish are or aren’t kosher. We had an interesting time with the fish issue in Australia- they have different fish there than we do here, and we didn’t know which ones were kosher (have fins and scales) and which weren’t, until we got a look at some whole fish at the Sydney fish market. I discovered that barramundi is kosher, and that I love it- I hadn’t tried it before we saw whole ones at the fish market, though. We could probably have looked up a list of kosher Australian fish online, but of course we didn’t think of that until we were there and didn’t have internet access.[/li][/ul]
I suppose it would be harder if we lived in an area with a lot of restaurants that don’t serve at least something vegetarian. That’s not a problem in the Bay Area, though we do read restaurant menus and make sure there will be something we can eat and that we would like (I’m a somewhat picky eater) before deciding to eat there. We’ll eat at buffet restaurants that serve things we can and can’t eat, as long as it’s either obvious which is which or they’re labelled. That means we can eat at some sushi buffets (like Todai), which label stuff, but not at others that don’t.
The restaurant issue does come up when we travel to countries where the native language is not English. What we do in that case is, we get a menu-oriented phrasebook or a phrasebook that includes names of foods, and take it to the restaurant with us. We also look for a kosher restaurant in whatever city we’re going to, and go there for a meal if possible- being able to eat meat is a nice change, because we’re eating only vegetarian food and kosher fish most of the time.
The whole thing doesn’t really make sense, and it’s not supposed to- it’s a rule given in the Bible with no explanation of why that rule is there. Any explanation you’ve seen about why Jews keep kosher is either speculation or someone’s personal reason for doing it- there is no official reason for it, other than “God said so”.
We do rekasher our kitchen before each Passover, and that is indeed painstaking and labor intensive. Of course, for us, there’s the additional burden of having forgotten some of the rules from one Passover to the next, since that’s the only time we re-kasher our kitchen. It’s sort of like how you always forget how to set the clock on your car radio between one switch between DST and standard time and the next.
Keeping kosher isn’t really painstaking most of the time (with the exception of Passover)- it just becomes part of your normal routine, kind of like living with a picky eater who won’t eat celery or mushrooms or what have you (but not nearly as bad as living with someone who won’t eat mushrooms- I love mushrooms). The rules don’t ever change, except during Passover, so it really does become second nature after a while, even for someone who converted to Judaism as an adult and grew up with no exposure to the concept of kosher.
It was a bear to learn, though. Before I started keeping kosher, it had never really occurred to me that it could be a big deal if something has meat in it or doesn’t. I didn’t read ingredient labels, and didn’t think about whether something had meat or not. I eased into keeping kosher gradually over the course of a couple of years. It’s also difficult to explain to a guest who doesn’t keep kosher- when my parents come to visit, we just ask them not to cook in the kitchen or get out plates or silverware, and let us do those things. And we eat out a lot, but that’s because my mom likes to eat out, and we have rather different tastes in food, the whole kosher issue aside.