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Orthodox Union certifies Israeli brand of lab-grown meat as kosher — but not pareve
(JTA) — The Orthodox Union has granted kosher certification to a type of lab-grown meat, a decision that could signal an expansion of the options available under Judaism’s intricate dietary laws.
The O.U., the most prominent kosher certifier in the United States, recognized poultry products from Israeli startup SuperMeat as kosher, the company announced Wednesday. The startup is part of a growing industry that aims to provide an alternative to traditional meat by creating the food in a laboratory from stem cells.
“This collaboration aims to bridge the gap between scientific understanding and halachic adjudication, setting unprecedented standards in the cultivated meat industry,” Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of O.U. Kosher, said in a statement, using a term referring to Jewish law.
The process of certifying lab-grown meat, a years-long quest for SuperMeat, demonstrated the complexity of applying Judaism’s age-old dietary laws to a culinary landscape where the range of foods, and how they are produced, is expanding rapidly — from lab-grown meat to plant-based alternatives and more. It may also represent yet another increase in the number of products kosher consumers can take off supermarket shelves.
“This step represents our commitment to inclusivity and respect for diverse dietary needs, making our cultivated chicken meat accessible to audiences around the world,” Ido Savir, CEO of SuperMeat, said in a statement. “We believe this historic initiative with the Orthodox Union not only broadens the options for kosher consumers worldwide but will also set clear guidelines for other companies in the cultivated meat industry seeking kosher certification, opening new avenues for the Kosher food industry.”
The lab-grown meat industry is in its infancy and may appeal to consumers who enjoy eating meat but oppose slaughtering animals for food. It remains to be seen whether lab-grown meat produced at a mass scale will be cheaper or more environmentally sustainable than regular beef or poultry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture granted its first approval for cell-cultured meat in late June, and SuperMeat first plans to roll out its products in the United States. The company is also looking into halal certification.
“The vast majority of the vegan-vegetarian movement is very supportive,” SuperMeat’s co-founder and CEO, Koby Barak, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2016. “And we thank them for really supporting us.”
On the surface, kosher certification for lab-grown meat doesn’t appear to herald a revolution for observant Jewish eaters, especially in places where traditional kosher animal products are already easy to find.
As with regular chicken, the O.U. has certified the lab-grown variety as kosher meat, meaning that it can’t be eaten with dairy products. That separates it from recent plant-based meat alternatives such as Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, many of whose products are certified as pareve — neither meat nor dairy — meaning that they may be eaten together with all kosher foods.
Plant-based meat has provided a pathway for observant Jews to eat imitations of some archetypal non-kosher foods, such as cheeseburgers or pizza with a meat topping. SuperMeat will not offer those kinds of possibilities.
But Genack said that for Jews who keep a stringent form of kosher laws, SuperMeat’s certification will be a boon. “Theoretically, the impact on prices and availability should be significant,” he said.
That’s because the company’s chicken products are categorized as Mehadrin kosher — the strictest form of kosher supervision. And if the O.U. moves to certify lab-grown beef as kosher, which it has yet to do, it could lead to an increase in the supply of meat that is “glatt” kosher, a term that refers to meat slaughtered from an animal whose lungs are smooth.
The kosher seal of approval came after SuperMeat hosted two rabbinic delegations, and kosher authorities held a series of conversations on Jewish law surrounding the science used in the company’s technology, the Times of Israel reported.
Obtaining kosher certification for lab-grown meat is complicated because the process of cultivating meat from stem cells requires the use of living animals — and kosher law bars the consumption of any part of a living animal. Founded in 2015, SuperMeat’s lab-grown poultry avoids this dilemma by acquiring stem cells from eggs rather than from the living birds themselves. And because the eggs are at an early stage of fertilization, there’s no concern that blood will end up in the product, which would also be prohibited by Jewish law.
“We were looking for something that can be universally accepted as Mehadrin, completely kosher, and that’s what taking the stem cells from the eggs represents,” Genack said.
The cells are planted in a meat fermenter that simulates a bird’s biology. In the fermenter, the cells are provided with heat, oxygen, and plant-based liquid nourishment. They then mature into meat tissue and grow quickly, doubling in mass in just a few hours. When the meat is ready to harvest, the liquid feed is removed.
Other Orthodox rabbis, such as Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, have ruled that some lab-grown meat labeled as a meat alternative could be considered pareve. Genack said that at the Orthodox Union, there were different opinions on how lab-grown meat should be classified.
But the agency decided to mark it as meat because it’s derived from an animal and looks exactly like meat.
Leading rabbis in the Conservative movement came to the same conclusion in 2018, ruling that lab-grown meat of kosher animals would be kosher but that disputes over its status and possible confusion meant it should be considered meat.
“Cultured meat should be designated as ‘meaty according to the rabbis’ even though there will be no need for kosher slaughter, inspection for injury, deveining, soaking or salting to remove blood,” wrote Rabbi Daniel Nevins, the author of the legal opinion on the topic that was accepted almost unanimously by the movement’s law committee.
Genack noted that lab-grown pork will remain off-limits because it is derived from a pig, which is not kosher. (The O.U. also declined to give certification to Impossible Pork, even though it is plant-based, because of what Genack called “sensitivities to the consumer.”)
“Anything which you derive from something non-kosher itself is not kosher,” he said. “If you milk a non-kosher animal, the milk is also non-kosher, because it derived from a non-kosher source. So this doesn’t open that opportunity.”
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The post Orthodox Union certifies Israeli brand of lab-grown meat as kosher — but not pareve appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel?
Firefighters respond to a fire near a rocket attack from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, near Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Last month, the BBC News website published a report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Lucy Williamson under the headline “Fires in northern Israel fuel demands to tackle escalation with Hezbollah.”
The following day, the BBC News website published another report by the same journalist on the same topic titled “Israelis using gardening tools to fight wildfires sparked by Hezbollah rockets.”
A couple of weeks later, that pattern was repeated. On June 19, the BBC News website published a report by Williamson headlined “Israel and Hezbollah play with fire as fears grow of another war,” which was previously discussed here.
Late on June 22, the BBC News website published another report titled “Unable to back down, Israel and Hezbollah move closer to all-out war,” which is credited to “Lucy Williamson, Reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border.”
If one assumed that the reason for the appearance within days of a second report on the same topic by the same journalist was the emergence of new information concerning the situation on Israel’s northern border, one would be wrong.
A considerable proportion of Williamson’s second report (which was also translated into Swahili) consists of interviews with people on both sides of the border: Israelis from Kiryat Shmona and Malkiya, and two residents of southern Lebanese villages.
Failing to clarify that her interviewee lives in a town described as one of the “bastions of strong Hezbollah support” where a strike against a Hezbollah command center took place in March, Williamson tells her readers that:
Fatima Belhas lives a few miles (7km) from the Israeli border, near Jbal el Botm.
In the early days, she would shake with fear when Israel bombed the area, she says, but has since come to terms with the bombardments and no longer thinks of leaving.
“Where would I go?” she asked. “[Others] have relatives elsewhere. But how can I impose on someone like that? We have no money.”
“Maybe it is better to die at home with dignity,” she said. “We have grown up resisting. We won’t be driven out of our land like the Palestinians.”
Readers may recall that just days earlier, another BBC report from southern Lebanon promoted that same “Nakba” comparison.
Similarly failing to note Hezbollah’s presence and infrastructure in Mays al Jbal (also Meiss al Jabal), Williamson continues:
Hussein Aballan recently left his village of Mays al Jbal, around 6 miles (10km) from Kiryat Shmona, on the Lebanese side of the border.
Life there had become impossible, he said, with erratic communications and electricity, and almost no functioning shops.
The few dozen families left there are mainly older people who refuse to leave their homes and farms, he told the BBC.
But he backed the Hezbollah assault on Israel.
“Everyone in the south [of Lebanon] has lived through years of aggression, but has come out stronger,” he said. “Only through resistance are we strong.”
Williamson fails to remind her readers that Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon 24 years ago, and that the only “aggression” has been in response to attacks by Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, such as the cross-border attack that sparked the war in 2006.
As in her previous report, Williamson portrays the events resulting from the Lebanese terror group’s decision to attack Israel on October 8 as “tit-for-tat”:
But as the tit-for-tat conflict grinds on, and more than 60,000 Israelis remain evacuated from their homes in the north, there are signs that both Israel’s leaders and its citizens are prepared to support military options to push Hezbollah back from the border by force.
Also, as in her own previous reports and in most other BBC content, Williamson fails to explain to her readers that according to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah should be nowhere near the border with Israel ,and that the UN’s “peacekeeping force” in Lebanon has failed to enforce that resolution since it was passed in 2006.
Williamson’s framing of the situation in the north of Israel includes the following:
The dangerous stalemate here hinges largely on the war Israel is fighting more than 100 miles (160km) to the south in Gaza.
A ceasefire there would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War. [emphasis added]
And:
Demands for political change are likely to increase when Israel’s conflicts end.
Many believe Israel’s prime minister is playing for time: caught between growing demands for a ceasefire in Gaza, and growing support for a war in the north.
In other words, Williamson’s framing ignores the fact that Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7, and that Hezbolah chose to attack Israel on October 8, and almost every day since then. She erases the fact that Hamas has rejected multiple ceasefire offers in order to promote a narrative whereby it is Israel’s prime minister alone who is “keeping both conflicts going”.
Moreover, she tells BBC audiences that:
The problem for Israel is how to stop the rockets and get its people back to the abandoned northern areas of the country.
The problem for Hezbollah is how to stop the rockets when its ally, Hamas, is being pounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Williamson cites a statement made by the UN Secretary General on June 21:
Hezbollah is a well-armed, well-trained army, backed by Iran; Israel, a sophisticated military power with the US as an ally.
Full-scale war is likely to be devastating for both sides.
The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said it would be a “catastrophe that goes […] beyond imagination”.
Like the UN Secretary General, Williamson has nothing to tell her audiences about the Lebanese state’s decades-long failure to tackle the Islamist terrorist organization that has repeatedly dragged that country into conflict, and has nothing to say about the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions designed to prevent further conflict.
The BBC’s sidelining of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and its whitewashing of the failures of the UN forces that are supposed to enforce it, did not begin in October 2023: that editorial policy has been evident for many years.
Now, however, that policy is being used to advance framing of a potential escalation after over eight months of continuous attacks on Israeli communities by Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, as something that is the responsibility of Israel alone.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Why Does the Media Not Tell the Truth About Hezbollah’s Attacks on Israel? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months
The University of Toronto has received an injunction to dismantle the pro-Palestinian encampment on its property. The 98-page decision from Justice Markus Koehnen of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said that members of the encampment must take down the tents within 24 hours, by 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3. Toronto Police will have […]
The post University of Toronto is granted an injunction to dismantle a pro-Palestinian encampment that has been on campus for two months appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal
Vandals in Canada targeted a Jewish cemetery. Photo: Screenshot
Vandals have targeted notable Jewish cemeteries in Cincinnati, Ohio and Montreal, Canada, sparking outcry and concern over mounting threats of antisemitism.
Vandals at Montreal’s Kehal Yisrael Cemetery placed memorial stones in the shape of a Nazi swastika on top of tombstones. Ones with the last names Eichler and Herman were targeted in the antisemitic attack.
Placing memorial stones on graves is an ancient Jewish custom to memorialize the dead. Jewish cemeteries oftentimes have stones nearby tombstones for mourners.
Canadian leaders decried the vandalism.
“It is absolutely abhorrent and revolting to defile the dead with swastikas,” Jeremy Levi, the Jewish mayor of a Jewish-majority suburb of Montreal, commented on X/Twitter. “This desecration at the Kehal Israel cemetery in Montreal is beyond contempt. [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau, step aside and get out of the way so we can reclaim our country. May this Kohen’s neshama have an Aliyah on high.” One of the tombstones vandalized belonged to a Kohen.
The leader of the Conservative Party in Canada’s parliament and candidate for prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, lambasted Trudeau and denounced antisemitism. “We cannot close our eyes to the disgusting acts of antisemitism that are happening in our country everyday,” he posted on X/Twitter. “The prime minister must finally act to stop these displays of antisemitism. If he won’t, a common sense Conservative government will.”
Canada, like many countries around the world, has experienced a surge in antisemitic incidents since the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’ massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Meanwhile in Cincinnati, vandals targeted two historic Jewish cemeteries this past week, toppling and shattering ancient tombstones — some dating back to the 1800s.
According to a statement from the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, 176 gravesites in Cincinnati’s West Side were ruined “in an act of antisemitic vandalism.”
“Due to the extensive damage and the historical nature of many of the gravestones, we have not yet been able to identify all the families affected by this act,” the statement continued. “Our community [is] heartbroken.”
The Cincinnati Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incidents.
The destruction of monuments is the latest in a greater trend of antisemitic vandalism. In an incident over the weekend, vandals in Australia targeted war memorials dedicated to Australian veterans who sacrificed their lives in Korea and Vietnam with pro-Hamas graffiti.
A couple weeks earlier, vandals in Belgium defaced two memorials for Holocaust victims with swastikas and a phrase calling for violence against Israel. In Germany, meanwhile, at least seven stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks in the sidewalk meant to mark Jewish homes seized by the Nazis, were defaced with the message “Jews are perpetrators.”
The US, Canada, Europe, and Australia have all experienced an explosion of antisemitic incidents in the wake of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and amid the ensuing war in Gaza. In many countries, anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked to record levels.
According to the B’nai Brith, antisemitic incidents in Canada more than doubled in 2023 compared to the prior year.
The post Jewish Cemeteries Vandalized in Cincinnati, Montreal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.