Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
My understanding is that the original intent of Kashrut is functional, to ensure that G-d's chosen people don't eat lower quality meat. The question, then would go to how that original intent transfers to an artificially created meat. I would assume it's halal and kosher, but I'm not as familiar with Judaism and Islam as I am with, say, Christianity.
|
Nobody knows what the original intent of the laws of kashrut were. "Original intent" is kind of a strict-constructionist device that isn't quite transferable into the halakhic (Jewish legal) paradigm. What is relevant to interpretation (for the most part) is not what we guess might have been the original aim of the law, but how the law has been interpreted by the Rabbis of the Talmud, and how it has been interpreted over the past 2000 years. The parameters of something being kosher don't have to do with "quality" like an FDA grade, but simply with whether the animal is on the list of approved kosher animals, whether it was slaughtered in accordance with the laws of ritual slaughter, and whether it has been drained of all blood, in accordance with the law against eating blood.
There's just beginning to be a movement that says that other factors should be taken into account, although these tend not to be "meat quality" issues, and more about making sure the people working for the kosher butchers are not being mistreated and abused and cheated, like the recent shameful incident at the Rubashkin plant in Iowa.
BTW, ever since I started reading this thread, I totally have Weird Al's "I Think I'm a Clone Now" stuck in my head...!