Halachically, the “fit” or “clean” animals designated for consumption by Jews are the ruminant, vegetarian animals.  A further requirement for kashrut is the traditional examination of the animals’ lungs to determine whether an animal is fit for consumption.  But developments in husbandry practices and in the emerging new pathogens in meat, such as BSE (Mad Cow Disease), campylobacter, and e-coli 1057,  undermines the definition of “fit” or “clean,” and has made the traditional exmaintion of the animals’ lungs irrelevant.  A food animal today can be judged as “kosher” and be unfit for consumption.

 Rabbi Moshe Feinstein recognized this problem in 1982, when he condemned the eating of the veal calf and declared “that it was forbidden [for Jews] to cause suffering to the animal by feeding it food which it does not enjoy and which causes it pain when it is eating, and causes it to suffer illness from which it will suffer pain.”  Unfortunately, all animals raised for the commercial market, kosher and non-kosher, are fed food that is bad for them, and many animals are contracting diseases which traditional kashrut examination cannot detect, nor be detected by traditional USDA inspection methods.

Brains of infected sheep, other sick animals, roadkill, chicken feathers, chicken litter, citrus pulp, sawdust, animal waste, are converted into animal feed for cattle by rendering plants which  are the major producers of animal feed.  Essentially, vegetarian animals are being fed meat protein and turned into carnivores.  Since halachically designated “fit” animals are the vegetarian animals, the question  is whether this designation of “vegetarian” was intended to be structural or functional or both, because animals who have evolved as vegetarians and whose perfect food was grass  have been relocated in the food chain?  Does it matter for kashrut that a vegetarian animal has been transformed into a carnivore?  It apparently matters as a question of the animals’ health and ultimately of human health. 

 Mad cow disease causes the cow to stumble like a drunkard, lose control of her body, appear drunk.  Hence the descriptive term, “mad cow.”  The scientific name is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).   The disease is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in human beings.  It causes neurological deterioration, dementia, agonizing muscle spasms, and is always fatal.

The disease is caused by a “prion” or renegate protein, which is impervious to radiation, gamma rays, or freezing, and thus far cannot be destroyed by any known method.  Since symptoms do not appear in animals for as long as two to eight years after infection (usually long after the animal has been slaughtered and eaten) and not for four--to thirty years in humans, predictability of its course is difficult and we will not know the ultimate toll  of BSE for some time to come.

 Rabbi  Feinstein, aware that traditional investigation of the cows’ lungs was inadequate for diagnosing new animal pathogens, recommended that the intestines of veal calves be examined as well as their lungs, though this was not traditional.  Since 1982, the dichotomy between “kosher” meat and unhealthy meat has widened further.  Inspection of lungs or of intestines may not yield the necessary information to determine whether an animal’s meat is unhealthy.  In 1989, Rabbi David Rosen condemned all meat raised according to the factory farming method.  His arguments were based on the problems of feeding antibiotics and hormones to animals because these are retained in the animal’s flesh and passed on to the consumer, and represent a violation of pikuach nefesh.

"Today as never before the cruelty in livestock trade renders meat eating and true kashrut incompatible....If meat eating were a mitzvah--an obligation--it would today in most cases be at best a ‘mitzvah haba’ah b’averah’ or rather ‘b’averot’--i.e. rendered illegitimate by illegitimate means."

In addition to the hazards caused by the use of antibiotics and hormones in meat--kosher and otherwise--there are the dangers of camphylobacter, a potentially fatal disease which causes nerve damage, and e-coli: 1057, which can result in kidney failure and fatality.  Once confined to animal manure, which is its source, and to rare hamburger meat, e-coli:1057 has now spread through the food chain and has infected even vegetables which are grown in soil that has been contaminated with cow feces infected with e-coli:1057.

Food borne  diseases are more easily contracted than AIDS, because you can do without sex or practise safe sex, but you cannot do without food or practice “safe food” if a contaminant is spread throughout the food chain.

 For almost a century, all that has been left of shechitah is the means by which the animal is killed during the last few minutes of its life--and even here there are violations in the use of shackling and hoisting of conscious animals, a process which is extremely painful to the animal.  Though this process has now been replaced in many kosher slaughtering houses where large animals, cows and bulls, are slaughtered, it is still used, as of this writing, in slaughtering houses where small animals, goats and lambs, are slaughtered.

The Jewish claim that shechitah was  the most merciful way to kill a food animal was true for millennia, and its practice was the symbol of Jewish guardianship over animals.  The terms ‘fit’ and ‘clean’ were understood as pledges  of the maintenance of Jewish law for every observant Jewish household,  and of the applicability of halacha to the present life  of Jews.  Today  shechitah, wherever commercial meat is sold in western countries, is the ghost of this great tradition.

Copyright (c) Roberta Kakechofsky, 2010