Ari Elias-Bachrach
Although there are multiple parties that claim to have invented the cheeseburger, all of its creation stories are based in America in the early part of the 20th century. Since its invention, the cheeseburger has wormed its way into American culture and has become a quintessentially American food. To kosher-keeping Jews, though, it is also one which is denied them due to the mixing of meat and dairy products, neither of which can be removed without fundamentally changing the product. Attempts at making an imitation cheeseburger for kosher-keeping Jews are nearly as old as the cheeseburger itself. Until now, most efforts have focused on using either faux-meat or faux-dairy made from alternative food sources like soy. Recent years have seen advances in the industry to the point where both faux-meat and faux-dairy products have greatly improved and taste very similar to the real thing. However, they are still not the same. There are two recent technological developments that have the potential to produce foods in new ways that may change which foods can be consumed by the kosher consumer. Surveying these new technologies and the halakhic literature that surrounds them can show us what the future of kosher foods holds.
The first evidence we have of someone using legumes to deliberately create an imitation dairy product dates to 1899. Almeda Lambert, a Seventh-day Adventist, published a cookbook entitled Guide for Nut Cookery, which includes recipes for “ice cream” made from almonds, peanut milk, and nut cream.[1] The Seventh-day Adventist Church preaches a vegan diet, so finding substitutes for dairy is a natural endeavor. The history of faux-meat and dairy products in the US is replete with innovations by religious Jews and Seventh-day Adventists. The first patent for a soy based ice cream was awarded in 1922. None other than Henry Ford was an early adopter of soy foods, serving soy ice cream for dessert at the Ford Engineering Laboratory following VIP luncheons in the 1930s.[2] In the decades that followed, soy and nut based faux-dairy products continued to appear. However, none enjoyed any large-scale commercial success. It wasn’t until 1971, when Heller Enterprises released Heller’s Non-Dairy Frozen Dessert, that a soy-based non-dairy frozen dessert product had any amount of commercial success.
Perhaps the most famous of the pareve non-dairy ice cream substitutes is Tofutti, developed by David Mintz in the early 1980s. Mintz had been experimenting with tofu-based substitutes for dairy for several years along with running a kosher restaurant. Mintz’s buffet first sold Tofutti in 1981, and began selling it to other eateries in 1982. Tofutti was a phenomenal success. By 1983, with skyrocketing sales, Mintz’s new company, called Tofu Time Inc., raised 2.76 million dollars in its IPO. By 1985, Tofutti sales had reached 17 million dollars. Mintz is also believed to be the first to use the phrase “dairy free,” in a pamphlet describing Tofutti that he published in 1982.[3] Most importantly for our story, because it was made from soy and not dairy, it was certified pareve from its very inception.[4]
The history of soy-based meats in the United States follows a similar arc. Although the first recorded use of vegetarian meat substitutes in China dates to the 16th and 17th centuries, they did not see commercial success in the United States until the 1960s and 1970s. The first certified kosher fake meat I was able to identify was a group of Worthington Farms products released in 1959.[5] (Worthington Farms was also founded by a group of Seventh-day Adventists.) Since then, the market has continued to expand, and today’s supermarkets are filled with dozens of brands of non-meat meats and non-dairy dairy products.
From a halakhic perspective, today’s imitation meat and dairy products pose very little complexity. In many ways, they are a modern manifestation of the teaching of Yalta, wife of Rav Nahman in the Talmud. Yalta is quoted in Hulin 109b as stating that for everything God forbade, there is a similar thing that is permitted. Among her list of examples are several forbidden foods with permitted foods that taste similar. In this light, imitation foods are nothing more than the modern shibuta fish – a kosher fish that, according to Yalta, tastes very much like pork. Since most imitation foods are plant-based, they are easy to make kosher, and as long as there are no dairy or meat additives, easy to certify pareve as well. Many of these products, like margarine, non-dairy coffee creamer, and veggie burgers, have become staples of the modern kosher diet, and are no longer new or extraordinary in any meaningful way. Newer products, such as Impossible Beef and Miyoko’s cheese, barely raise an eyebrow amongst kosher consumers when they are released.
While putting a piece of cheese on a veggie burger or having soy based ice cream after eating a hamburger might satisfy some, there is no denying that these imitation products do not taste exactly like the real things they are trying to replace. Laboratories may be able to make soy protein taste very similar to a hamburger, but it will probably never be precisely the same as beef. Recent technological advances, however, have brought us to the cusp of two distinct and consequential food revolutions.
While two products can be made to taste similar, their taste will still be different due to the differences in their underlying structure – soybeans and beef are inherently different products. In recent years there have been advances in creating dairy and meat products from artificial non-animal based sources. Cultured meat has garnered most of the headlines; however, dairy proteins produced from genetically modified organisms are already being used commercially, and the major kashrut organizations seem to be more inclined to certify them as pareve.
Fermentation has been used in food production for millenia. When a substrate is fermented, the resulting product usually has the same halakhic status as the initial substrate, and the microorganism is disregarded.[6] Traditionally, fermentation has used naturally occurring microorganisms to produce a desired product – for example, yeast added to dough that will produce carbon dioxide to make the bread rise, or yeast added to wheat to make alcohol for beer.
What is new is scientists being able to genetically modify microorganisms to produce a specific product instead of being limited to the ones nature has provided. This process is called precision fermentation, and it has been around for decades. It is used to make everything from pharmaceuticals like insulin to food additives like citric acid. The modified organisms essentially become microscopic factories for the desired chemical. One previous use of precision fermentation that had an impact on kosher products in the 1980s was a new process to produce rennet (used for curdling milk to make cheese). Previously, rennet was extracted from the stomachs of calves – a process that gets coverage in the Talmud and other halakhic works due to concerns over the potential for mixing meat and dairy products. Today, in the United States, commercial cheese makers largely use artificially produced animal-free rennet; more than 95% of the hard cheese made in America is now produced with microbial rennet.[7] This fact is part of the reason for Rav Soloveitchik’s famous heter that allowed him to eat Kraft American cheese, which was not independently certified kosher.[8] (His full reasoning is complex, and a discussion of that position is outside the scope of this article.)
Recently, a company called Perfect Day has genetically modified a strain of the Trichoderma reesei fungus to produce milk whey proteins. The modified fungi are put in a tank with sugar. They consume the sugar and produce whey protein – one of the two proteins that are present in milk. The final product is identical to the protein produced by cows, but with one key difference for the kosher consumer – no animals are involved in the production. Perfect Day’s protein is currently certified kosher and pareve by the Star-K, despite being the exact same whey protein that is normally derived from milk. This proves what is likely most people’s intuition that chemicals excreted from genetically modified microorganisms are kosher and pareve.[9] Several consumer products are already available that use Perfect Day’s protein, some of which carry hashgachah.
Hard cheese, however, is made with casein protein, not whey protein. Several startups are working on producing precision fermented casein protein, which could be used to make animal-free hard cheese. Although none have yet managed to progress to the point of producing commercial products, and I have not been able to identify one that is certified kosher, precision fermentation is a proven technology and it is clearly only a matter of time before animal-free casein protein, and then cheese, can be developed.
Meat, on the other hand, is more complex. It is not a single molecule, but an amalgamation of proteins, fats, and sinews which combine to give meat its taste and texture. Current research is focused not on generating it via microorganisms, but on growing meat cells in a lab from a small sample. While significant strides have been made in the last few years, the technology is still being developed. Only a few products have been approved for sale in the US, and there is still nothing available to consumers in grocery stores. The field is filled with many startups, all trying to develop their technology. Not all of these companies are open about the details of what they are doing, and it is, of course, impossible to predict with certainty which technologies will or will not prove themselves in the long run. That being said, there are three methods of producing cultured meat that are worthy of discussion.
The initial method scientists have been pursuing to produce cultured meat is to use muscle precursor cells. After taking a muscle sample from a living animal, these cells can be grown in a laboratory environment where they will multiply and create muscle fibers, eventually growing into a piece of meat. There were some in the Israeli Chief Rabbinate who argued for a time that cultured meat growth should be considered analogous to fermentation.[10] This would have led to a very strict ruling, as the medium fed to the cells is usually not kosher, and as a fermented product’s halakhic status is based on the substrate, cultivated meat would be extremely difficult to make kosher.[11] However, most of the recent halakhic opinions written on the topic have abandoned the fermentation analogy.
Although there are not many published opinions to go on, there are a variety of opinions as to how to treat this product halakhically. Some of the reasons to treat it as pareve have included the possibility of treating cultured meat the same as a cow created through the study of Sefer Yetzirah[12] or meat that fell from heaven,[13] both of which are treated as kosher and pareve by the Talmud.[14] However, intriguing as these possibilities are, most of the published positions seem clear that meat grown from an existing cow’s muscle would also be halakhically treated as meat.[15],[16],[17] This means that all of the stringencies usually applied to meat would apply here too – the sample must come from a kosher animal and it must be killed in a kosher manner.[18] Ultimately, it is unlikely that this topic will ever receive the full halakhic treatment that it deserves, as to date no product using this technology has asked for a ruling from a kashrut organization, and newer technologies have shown more promise, both from a technological and halakhic perspective, rendering the debate around cultured meat grown from muscle precursor cells somewhat moot.[19]
A second method of growing cultured meat involves using fetal stem cells. A blastocyst is harvested from a cow’s uterine horns (the top of the uterus where it meets the fallopian tubes) before it is implanted in the uterus. At this stage of development, the blastocyst is a small mass of cells about 0.1-0.2 mm in diameter. The inner part of the blastocyst is made of stem cells which will develop into the fetus. The outer layer will develop into the placenta. The stem cells from the inner part of the blastocyst can be differentiated to create the various components of a cut of meat such as muscle and collagen. They are then fed the nutrients necessary for growth in a growth reactor until they develop into a piece of meat.
Two Israel-based companies of note that are using fetal stem cells are SuperMeat and Aleph Farms. SuperMeat is focused on making poultry, while Aleph Farms is focused on beef. Both stated a desire early in their process to be kosher and, if possible, pareve. Both have also sought out opinions from leading kashrut authorities and have received similar results. Israeli Chief Rabbi David Lau wrote a teshuvah (responsum) on Aleph Farms’ process.[20] He ruled that, because the stem cells are taken before implantation into the uterus, they are pareve, and if they are then grown in a pareve growth medium, it would lead to a final product which is pareve, like any vegetable product. He even ruled that there is no issue of marit ayin (a permitted action which looks like a forbidden action) when mixing it with dairy, due to the common nature of imitation meat products. However, he also ruled that if the final product looked like meat and was sold like meat, it had the potential to lead people to make mistakes by mixing real dairy and meat, and therefore it should not be eaten or cooked with dairy. The principle he applied was hergeil aveirah (accustoming people to sin). The more commonly known principle of marit ayin proscribes a permitted action because it looks like something forbidden and might cause an observer to conclude that the forbidden action is permitted. Hergeil aveirah, on the other hand, is about the individual themselves and the concern that if they habitually perform certain actions in a permitted scenario, they may accidentally perform that same action in a forbidden one as well. A very similar example is the prohibition of making dairy bread: the sages were concerned that, since bread is commonly eaten with both meat and dairy products, someone making dairy bread might accidentally eat their bread with meat.[21] In choosing this principle, the implementation of this ruling will most likely be more restrictive than if the Rabbinate had applied marit ayin. As marit ayin is about confusing an observer, there are ways to mitigate those concerns with a hekeir, a sign that indicates that the action is permitted. Marit ayin is also much more fluid: as societal norms change, what might be misconstrued can also change, and, as a product becomes commonplace, there is less of a concern of an onlooker confusing it for something else.[22] Not so with hergeil, as that is about an individual’s actions and habits, so a product becoming more common and less likely to cause confusion for an onlooker is less relevant.
The Israeli rabbinic group Tzohar, representing the Dati-Leumi wing of the Israeli rabbinical establishment, has also issued a position paper on meat from stem cells and came to the same conclusions regarding the meat being kosher and pareve. Noticeably absent from their position is the Rabbinate’s opinion on the potential for leading to sin. It is likely, then, that Tzohar is of the opinion that stem-cell-derived cultured meat may be cooked with dairy.[23]
SuperMeat did much of the early outreach work in this area, having approached a number of Dati-Leumi rabbis several years ago to get their opinions on whether their chicken was kosher and pareve. Several of them, including R. Dov Lior, R. Yuval Cherlow (one of the founders of Tzohar), and R. Shlomo Aviner, said in an interview posted to Facebook[24] that the product would be pareve. Although detailed halakhic reasoning was not provided at the time, they focused largely on the fact that something grown from individual cells is not an animal and therefore cannot halakhically be considered meat. They felt that the changes it undergoes qualifies it as panim hadashot ba’u le-khan –an entirely new creation that is not connected to the previous substance. However, much of the logic this argument uses also applies to gelatin made from a non-kosher animal – a topic that is subject to significant debate and not permitted by most of the major American kashrut organizations. More recently, SuperMeat has been granted kosher certification by the OU, which clearly rejected the panim hadashot argument and classified the product as meat.[25]
While it appears that the first generation of cultivated meat is likely to produce products that are classified as meat by the major kashrut organizations, there is a third possibility raised by John Loike, Ira Bedzow, and Rabbi Moshe Tendler. They laid out the main issues surrounding the kashrut of stem cell beef in Hakirah 24.[26] They suggest that cultured meat would be unlikely to be pareve, unless it were to be made from skin-based stem cells. However, this would have to be another technological advancement, and it does not appear to be a current research focus. The current research aimed at making muscles from muscle precursor cells and stem cells has a global market. Assuming it succeeds, the market for growing muscle from skin stem cells would essentially only be the kosher consumer wanting the product for its halakhic advantages. Much of the money that has been invested in companies working to produce cultured meat with the promise of a financial return would be unlikely to see nearly as much of a return investing in a product with a much smaller potential market share. It is also worth noting that this article was published before the teshuvot from the Chief Rabbinate were published, and it is possible that the Rabbinate (and other agencies following their lead) would still classify the product as meat for the reasons that R. Lau laid out in his response.
Mahloket (debate) is obviously nothing new to religious Judaism, and it seems inevitable that some will consider a cultured meat product to be meat while others will consider it pareve. If the gelatin debate is to be used as a guide, the major American hashgachah agencies will probably rule strictly.[27] There is always the possibility of developing meat from stem cells found in the skin, which would be universally accepted as pareve, but this would take research and development effort that may not be worth the payout, especially since it’s very possible that the same stringencies that have been applied to fetal stem cells could also be applied to skin-derived stem cells.
It would seem then that pareve cheese made from precision fermented dairy proteins is going to come much sooner than cultured meat. The technology has been proven over a period of decades and is already being used to produce food for consumers. Although it has made tremendous strides in the last few years, cultured meat is still working towards being ready for consumer consumption. When it is available, the first generation of cultured meat products is not going to be universally recognized as pareve – it will be, at best, subject to a mahloket over whether it is considered pareve or meat. A meat product that can be universally recognized as pareve would require, at a minimum, further technological research and development, or, if the Chief Rabbinate’s position on leading to sin takes hold, it could be impossible. Cultured meat may continue to garner headlines, and for good reasons – cultured meat is going to have a much wider impact on the world as a whole. However, at least for the kosher consumer, precision fermented dairy proteins are going to give us a kosher cheeseburger far sooner.
[1] Almeda Lambert, Guide for Nut Cookery, (Battle Creek, Michigan: Joseph Lambert & Company, 1899), 411-413.
[2] William Shurtleff & Akiko Aoyagi, History of Soy Ice Cream and Other Non-Dairy Frozen Desserts (1899-2013), (Lafayette California: Soy Info Center, 2013), https://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/167/Ice.pdf.
[3] SoyInfo Center, History of Soy Ice Cream and Other Non-Dairy Frozen Desserts (1899-2013), SoyInfo Center, https://www.soyinfocenter.com/books/167.
[4] A spokesperson for Tofutti told me that they have used the Kof-K for certification since the product was first released.
[5] William Shurtleff & Akiko Aoyagi, History of the Soyfoods Movement Worldwide (1960s-2019), (Lafayette California: Soy Info Center, 2019), https://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/215/SFM2.pdf.
[6] Zushe Blech, Kosher Food Production, (Ames, Iowa: Wiley & Blackwell, 2008), 104.
[7] Jeanne Yacoubou, “An Update ON Rennet,” The Vegetarian Resource Group,https://www.vrg.org/journal/vj2008issue3/2008_issue3_update_renet.php.
[8] Shlomo Brody, “Have Halakha Handbooks Changed Pesikat Halakha? Laws We Don’t Teach in Public,” in Text and Texture, (Rabbinical Council of America, September 7 2009), https://www.academia.edu/38977213/Have_Halakha_Handbooks_Changed_Pesikat_Halakha_Laws_We_Dont_Teach_in_Public&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1723170206453242&usg=AOvVaw2EUxhAr4Ddh-7qf-UNpCIh.
[9] The Star-K provides no specific guidance on this product with respect to marit ayin. However, it is worth noting that this is not a consumer product. It is a protein sold commercially and used in the manufacturing process to produce consumer products like milk, ice cream, and cheese.
[10] John D. Loike, Ira Bedzow, and Moshe D. Tendler, “Pareve Cloned Beef Burgers: Health and Halakhic Considerations,” Hakirah 24 (2018): 201.
[11] It is also possible that this will not be an issue at some point in the future, as the growth medium is an area of significant scientific research, and new advances will involve kosher substances.
[12] Sanhedrin 65b.
[13] Sanhedrin 59b.
[14] https://www.machonso.org/hamaayan/?gilayon=40&id=1201.
[15] John D. Loike, Ira Bedzow, and Moshe d. Tendler, “Pareve Cloned Beef Burgers: Health and Halakhic Considerations,” Hakirah 24 (2018): 196.
[16] https://www.tzohar.org.il/wp-content/uploads/basar.pdf.
[17] https://jewishlink.news/lab-grown-meat-ou-koshers-approach/.
[18] Making cultured meat from a muscle sample kosher is not a trivial undertaking. However, it is beyond the scope of this article.
[19] As with any technological development, it goes without saying that future breakthroughs could change this. However this is the situation as it currently stands.
[20] https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2023/01/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%9C%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%91-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A9%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C-%D7%91%D7%A9%D7%A8-%D7%9E%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%AA.pdf.
[21] Pesahim 36a, Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Dei’ah 97:1.
[22] Kreiti U-Pleiti, Yoreh Dei’ah 87:8. See also Yabi’a Omer, Yoreh Dei’ah 9:10.
[23] https://www.tzohar.org.il/?p=41799.
[24] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1532234013748970.
[25] In an email, the OU told me that they viewed its meat’s pareve status as a matter of debate. Obviously, they decided to be strict and consider it meat.
[26] John D. Loike, Ira Bedzow, and Moshe D. Tendler, “Pareve Cloned Beef Burgers: Health and Halakhic Considerations,” Hakirah 24 (2018).
[27] https://oukosher.org/halacha-yomis/ou-position-gelatin-non-kosher-animals/.
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