Tuesday, November 28, 2017

food - Why would a product be "only for cooking and pureeing"?


A recent OU kashrut alert that I found on Kashrut.com says:



Kirkland Nature's Three Berries: Rader Farms, Inc.: This product bears a Half-Moon K symbol and should be used only for cooking and pureeing.



Why would cooking or pureeing be OK but other uses (presumably raw snacking) be not OK?



Answer




My guess is that it's a bug issue. Yuck.


If one bug was pureed (or cooked, assuming cooking breaks apart the bug) with several cups of berries, the ground-up bug is nullified ("batel") 1:60 by volume and you can eat the puree. This minute quantity of non-kosher ingredient, which isn't a flavoring, coloring, stabilizer, or enzyme, is not a problem.


However, as long as the bug remains whole, there's the rule that complete organisms ("berya") don't get nullified in large mixtures. There's a chance if you snacked raw that you'd consume a whole bug, hence a problem.


While we're on yuck factors -- there are notes online from Rabbi Tendler's lecture that the carp and whitefish back in Eastern Europe often contained parasitic worms. If you wanted to eat whitefish filet, you had to break apart the flesh to find the worms (which is what Rabbi Moshe Feinstein did). Conveniently, if you grind everything up and make gefilte fish, no more whole organisms, no problem.


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