Vegan Treyf
They said it couldn't be done. Were they right?
I was chopping up a big carrot from a cropshare the other day and noticed a green ring running down the center.
Carrots turn green for the same reason Jamaican oranges do—the roots somehow get exposed to enough sunlight that it makes sense for them to start producing chlorophyll. From this green center, I’m guessing the soil shifted while it was young, exposing the roots to sunlight for a while until somebody replanted it deeper, allowing the orange to grow around the green.
Green carrots are fine to eat, but somewhat tougher and more bitter than carrots of other colors. So to improve the consistency and flavor, I used what happened to be to hand: I added some cinnamon and chili powder to a small bowl of almond milk, let the carrot slices soak in the bowl for about 20 minutes, then took them out and roasted them with olive oil.
My spouse walked in on this process in the early stages, expressed mild horror, and confidently predicted that this would not taste good. She was sincere, but also she knows I love it when she does that. It immensely improves the payoff in satisfaction when these gambits work. And it did work, this time. The carrots absorbed a distinct milky flavor, which came out more as they cooled, and a bit of the spices. We both thought it was delicious. (Not wanting to waste it, I used the leftover spiced milk to make overnight oats, which was…edible.)
Later it occurred to me to think of this in terms of Deuteronomy 14:21, the prohibition against cooking a young goat in its mother’s milk. This prohibition, which appears three times in the Torah, is the foundation of many kosher dietary restrictions. Talmudic Jews interpret it to prohibit any mixing of meat and dairy. In cooking a plant in a plant-based milk, had I violated a similar generalization?
This would be kind of exciting—I theoretically don’t keep kosher, but I also don’t eat meat, which makes it pretty hard to adhere to a non-kosher lifestyle. All of the other kosher restrictions involve meat, too, so there’s seemingly nothing left that can be treyf, un-kosher food. But if the verse about cooking a goat can be interpreted to concern eating bison and cheddar at a restaurant, why can’t it also be interpreted to cover what is apparently called “carote al latte” in Italy? I’d been motivated to use the milk by the juvenile center of the carrot. So really, I was cooking a young carrot in milk, it just happened to be surrounded by a mature carrot. (Also, one of the carote al latte recipes I found after the fact says to use young carrots if you can.)
Many people who do keep kosher (or halal, which is very similar) would say I’m eating treyf all the time. They believe that all purchased food has to be assumed to be tainted unless certified otherwise by a qualified rabbi, who claims to somehow be able to verify that minute particles of dairy or meat can never make it into the product, or at least never more than 1.5% of it (one part in sixty). This inspection requirement is why you’ll sometimes see a kosher certification on something incongruous, like seltzer or salt, instead of just on foods where the ingredients aren’t obvious. Some don’t eat meat with almond milk, just in case some cow milk got in there.
But, as the saying goes, if you’re going to eat pork, let it dribble all over your beard. If I’m technically impure anyway, and as a card-carrying classical Cynic I have to believe I am, I might as well keep cooking a true abomination unto the Lord. So let’s try and build a case against me.
Flavor counts
The prohibition has usually been categorized with the “inexplicable” commandments, in the typology where every injunction is either derivable from first principles and your innate moral sense (no murdering), has a rational explanation but you’d never get to it a priori (put a mezuzah on your door), or “because the Torah says so.” This makes it extra difficult to interpret its limits.
Scholars going back at least to Maimonides in the 12th century have speculated that the rule was meant to specifically prohibit some long-forgotten pagan ritual where you literally cooked a goat in its mother’s milk. But they’ve also generally felt that you need to draw a wide boundary around it. By Maimonides’s time, it was agreed that almond milk with meat is only okay if you prominently display whole almonds next to the milk at all times, in order to avoid even the appearance of sin. Maimonides was also a scholar of medicine and wrote that mixing meat with milk was gross and made you bloat, so you should avoid it even when it’s not part of a heathen ceremony.
The definition of “meat” is more controversial. Many argue that birds and/or fish don’t count here, since they have no mother’s milk. I can’t find anybody arguing that vegetables are, or can be, meat, so I’ll have to do it myself.
First, the Talmud is explicit that flavor, as well as substance, can render something treyf. For example, from the Gemara:
Abaye said: The principle that the flavor of a forbidden food renders prohibited the substance in which it is absorbed, and it is not necessary for there to be actual forbidden substance, applies by Torah law in general…
But a taste cannot be imparted through physical contact without also transferring some of the substance. So this principle must be understood to apply to memetic flavor transfer—if a flavor was inspired by a prohibited substance, everything with that flavor is prohibited. As a special case, it follows that vegan foods that mimic meat and dairy mixtures are themselves treyf.
Furthermore, the Torah doesn’t particularly define “meat” as a distinct category from vegetables. When the Lord tells Adam and Eve they can eat (almost) any plant, the Torah uses the same word, לְאָכְלָֽה, as it does when talking about eating animals. The King James Version translates the word as “meat:”
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every1 tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. — Genesis 1:29
Therefore, any broad interpretation of the prohibition must apply to plants as well.
Postscript: Shemitta
There’s one more way carrots can be treyf, or something like it: over-farming. The Torah contains several restrictions on farming and harvesting, and these are often grouped with, or discussed alongside, kosher laws. Hence this delightful post from rabbis at a Jerusalem yeshiva, entitled “The Case of the Contraband Carrots.”
Leviticus 25 specifies that land in Israel must be allowed to lie fallow one year out of every seven. You’re not allowed to stagger this—everybody has to stop sowing and reaping according to the same calendar. Edible plants that happen to grow anyway are considered ownerless—everybody has the right to forage on everybody’s land. (Even in the other six years, you’re always supposed to leave some for foragers.)
It’s generally agreed that this law only applies to land in Israel (when owned by Jews). So we don’t have to worry about it in diaspora, except…
In the case in question, someone in the U.S. bought carrots from a local store and used them to cook up “two huge pots of chicken soup.” But she then discovered that some of the carrots were likely imported from Israel. Since this was 2015, a fallow year, that was problematic. So, via her visiting Israeli son-in-law, she asked about the kosher status of the soup, carrots, and pot. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I do want to highlight their discussion of how contagious this particular law is. If you sell produce grown in a fallow year, and use the money to buy a fish, that fish is now subject to the same requirements. If you then trade the fish for oil, the burden leaves the fish and passes to the oil. Then, if you cook something in the oil…
This cycle continues ad infinitum… This certainly is a reason to be vigilant regarding unwittingly purchasing potential Shemitta produce.
The next time this applies will be the autumn harvest of 2028. I hope we have plenty to argue about.
Bonus: Other debatably Vegan Treyf foods
The other way to get Vegan Treyf is to probe the edges of the definition of vegan, rather than treyf. Oysters are a perfect example.
Shellfish are unambiguously treyf, due to Deuteronomy 14:9-10. Many self-described vegans, sometimes termed ostrovegans, eat oysters and/or some other mollusks. These shellfish are considered “less likely to be conscious” than other small animals and insects, due to their lack of a central nervous system and because once they reach adulthood, they don’t really respond to their environment. Making them, ethically speaking, maybe a plant. Although a 2006 study cited in the linked page found that they can hear predators, causing their heart rate to increase. But plants have reactions like that too. Following this train of thought long enough risks deciding, as some do, that it’s unethical to eat vegetables, since they can’t generally be harvested if they die of natural causes. And now there’s a quote I need to include or risk being disowned.
“So, these carrots?” “Have been murdered, yes.” — Notting Hill (1999).
The other Ambiguously Vegan food that comes to mind is honey. Most vegans, I think, consider it an animal product and therefore forbidden. The question is really whether your veganism is about preventing suffering or exploitation. In most cases, this comes down to the same thing, because factory farms are brutal. But bees, for the most part, probably don’t suffer more on a farm than in the wild. The objectionable aspect is that we’re messing with their lives and benefiting thereby.
Honey pretty much has to be considered kosher, given all of the “promised land of milk and honey” stuff in the Torah. But the exact rationale for this has historically been difficult to pin down. Bees themselves aren’t kosher, and in all other cases, that which emerges from a non-kosher critter is treyf. The argument is sometimes that honey is similar enough to the nectar it comes from that it counts as a plant product, unlike the milk produced from grass. This makes it not just kosher, but parve, a food you can mix with either milk xor goat. The only Biblical character who manages to maybe eat treyf honey is Samson, who seems to be able to break every law except the hair one without losing his powers. Samson kills a lion in self-defense, then returns weeks later and collects honey from a beehive inside the carcass. Here, too, there’s a lot of debate about whether this is treyf.
Then, of course, there’s the problem that according to California law, honey comes from fish.
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