The common Rabbinical retort to this is that their dishes will go to heaven. ;j
Back to the OP:
This is just a guess:
If you check out Hershey’s Kashrus page (yes, they have one), you’ll see that all three items in the “Hershey’s 'N More” line are not kosher. One of those items is Hershey’s 'N More Marshmellow. Marshmellow is a very tricky item, kashrus wise. It’s entirely possible that the other two Hersheys 'N More products are produced on the same equipment as the Marshmellow product, making the other two items not kosher.
Zev Steinhardt
In relation to the marshmallow discussion, here’s an interesting article with pictures about this guy who wanted to try making “real” marshmallows from the Marsh Mallow plant as opposed to your standard Stay-Puft marshmallow guy or your fish gelatin marshmallow. All in the pursuit of making organic rice krispies, apparently.
[semi-relevant anecdote]
To sort of expand on what Anne Neville said, kosher-ness may be binary, but Jew-ness is not. My grandmother, who certainly considers herself a Jew (not sure which type) once told us a story about how she was at a wedding, where they had cooked an entire pig on one of those old school spear-and-crank deals that I don’t know the name of. In whatever the cultural tradition was, pork was a very big deal. Someone noticed that she wasn’t eating any, and when she explained, tried to talk her into it. Apparently, refusing the pork for non-medical reasons came across as vaguely rude, I guess. So she ended up have a small helping of it. The story ends with her laughing, “I think God will forgive us, just this one time.” 
[/semi-relevant anecdote]
Imagine going through life never knowing the sweet taste sensation of ham and cheese together…unbelievable.
This is a great thread. I understand the forbidden food distinctions, but the thing that always seemed rather odd is the separation/two sets of utensils.
You can have kosher meat, and of course kosher dairy, but somehow if a knife that once touched a piece of meat is used (probably not a good example) to stir a glass of chocolate milk that somehow there is a contamination?
Is there a test known to science that could determine if a sterilized/cleaned metal utensil ever touched one classification (meat/dairy) of food?
If you clean your metal utensils (in good faith), why is this determined to be a kosher no-no?
Thanks.
Bwana Bob:
You ask good questions. Allow me to explain some of the principles behind meat-and-dairy Kosher laws.
As you no doubt already know, meat and dairy can’t be eaten together in Jewish law. Now, there is a principle in Jewish law which states that a pot that something is cooked in will absorb some of the substance within its walls. Another, related principle says that the only way that the stuff absorbed inside will come out is through the same process it got in…in other words, by heat. If you bioled meat in water in a pot, the only way to get the pot free of meat substance is to boil water in the pot and then discard that water. A grill upon which meat was roasted would need to be exposed to fire of equivalent heat without any meat on it in order to free the grill of any absorbed meat substance. A simple scrubbing won’t do. And more so, if one were to attempt to cook a dairy product in that same pot, the meat substance would be released from the pot walls in the cooking process…right into the dairy product you’re cooking, which will render it non-Kosher.
In addition, the heat for absorption does not need to be as much as needed for cooking. A hot piece of meat placed on a plate will cause the plate to absorb, and if you placed a hot dairy product on the plate afterward, even if you did a normal dish-washing, the heat of the food you put on there might very well draw out some of the meat substance, rendering the food non-kosher.
However, that said, it is possible to use a pot for both meat and milk, if one will go through the “kashering” process described above…applying equivalent heat with no food. Nonetheless, that only works for metal items. Items made of earthen substances - a category that includes glass and china - NEVER FULLY release the traces they absorb. So a china soup tureen used for hot chicken soup, or a ceramic coffee mug (if you like cream in your coffee) can never be used for a food of the other type.
So, what’s a Kosher-observant fellow to do? Well, he’ll need separate sets of dishes and silverware, because to Kasher your utensils between each hot meal is ridiculous. For cold foods, a simple scrubbing is enough to enable one dish to be used for both. But if you’ve got separate dishes already, why the heck would you bother using the dairy set for a cold meat product?
And no, there’s no scientific test known that can determine what a utensil was last used for. We Kosher-observant Jews rely on our memories…and if we don’t know what a given dish was used for, we Kasher or discard.
Ok, a question. From what I understand, the rule about not mixing meat and milk comes from the “don’t boil a calf in its mother’s milk” law. Fair enough. Yet, chickens don’t produce milk – why would it still not be kosher to mix non-milk-producing animals (like chicken or fish) with milk?
Eating chicken and milk together isn’t kosher. It’s true that chickens don’t have milk, and therefore the problem wouldn’t arise under biblical law, but it was decided by the rabbis that cooked chicken is similar enough to goat meat or beef that it falls under the same prohibition.
Fish can be eaten with dairy.
Which is fortunate, otherwise the Jews never would have given us cream cheese and lox on bagels. We dodged a bullet there, people.