Kosher Eating- Separating Milk and Meat
The rules about not mixing milk and meat are amongst the strictest of all the kosher laws. Central to them is the principle of kindness along with the health benefits arising from separation.
As Jews we are told not only to refrain from eating dairy products and meat during the same meal but also to abstain from eating meat until a certain amount of time has elapsed after eating dairy, and vice versa.
The amount of time that we are supposed to wait varies between different regions. For instance, Dutch Jews wait for an hour whilst most British Jews wait for three.
Pareve foods are neither milk nor meat based, and are therefore seen as ‘neutral’. This means that they can be eaten with either meat or dairy. According to kosher laws, bread should always be pareve (thus not made with butter or milk).
Households that follow kosher laws strictly have different sets of utensils, crockery and cutlery for dairy and meat meals to prevent any type of mixing. Moreover, since it is important to prevent ‘contamination’ during the washing up of these items, these households also have separate washing up bowels or dishwashers.
There are many theories about the kosher laws governing the separation of milk and meat. There is certainly a health benefit associated with not mixing the two. Dairy and meat take different times for the body to digest, therefore separating meat and dairy aids digestion.
Another theory is that separating milk and meat is a way of showing kindness and consideration to animals, a principle that is central to Judaism. The emotive language contained in the rule about not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk demonstrates the perceived cruelty associated with doing so.
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