Are YA vegans anti-semetic?

Question

From time to time, when someone asks a question about determining what salad dressing, cookies, BBQ sause, crackers etc, are veggie I will suggest one way to find okay food is to look for a kosher symbol such as U inside a circle, or a K inside a circle or triangle.

This always results in a lot of thumbs down.

This approach works because Jewish diatary law forbids mixing milk and meat. So unless the food is marked as being meat or marked as being dairy it contains neither meat nor milk what is refered to as parve.

Why are people so against using this as one method for finding vegan food?

Is it anti-semitism?
Or jeolousy because not nearly as much food is marked vegan?
Bitter because Jewish dietary law which was the first religion to incorporate respect for animals into the religion didn't go all the way to vegitarianism?

Jill - I missed the eggs. But animal fat won't be in the food. Although kosher beef lard would not make cookies unkosher per se, kosher cookies don't contain it because it would make the food a meat product. Observant Jews would not buy cookies that if eaten would mean you could not drink milk with (or for the next 6 hours)

Answer 1

Considering I grew up Jewish, no.

The thumbs down are because the answers are inaccurate.

An item will be marked pareve if there is no dairy or meat in the ingredients. Sometimes, it's vegan. However, there could be eggs or fish in there (as fish is considered pareve, not meat). A vegan item might be marked with the "D" outside the circle because of shared machinery--a particularly observant Jew may avoid that with or shortly after a meat meal because of the possibility of trace amounts of milk, but many vegans will eat it if there is no dairy in the ingredients.

There are also observant Jews who consider gelatin a "meat" product--it doesn't matter how processed the part is, it's still part of an animal. So they look for products with fish gelatin because they are pareve.

Answer 2

You're probably getting thumbs down because it's a good tool, but not a completely accurate one, so it's misleading to think just the pareve symbol will tell whether the product is vegan. As mentioned before, pareve includes fish, eggs, and honey. And there's a split between Orthodox and Reform Jews about the issue of processed animal parts (such as gelatin), with most Orthodox Jews saying gelatin must be vegetable or fish to be pareve, and most Reform Jews saying *all* gelatin is pareve. Since I'm not sure who is running which kosher certification, that makes using the pareve symbol a bit iffy in that area as well. (Maybe other vegans are better informed, but I've never run into a problem where I needed to know that.)

I do use a combination of the ingredients, the kosher pareve symbols, and the allergy warnings to determine whether I'm cool with buying it. If you say you can use the pareve symbol as a tool to rule out most meat and dairy, but still have to look for fish, eggs, etc., instead of implying that pareve = vegan, you would probably get more thumbs up.

Answer 3

Maybe some are, but not as a rule... and no one has openly admitted it.

Kosher gets thumbed down because it does not mean vegetarian. Kosher foods often use fish (apparently it is not considered meat in Judaism). Also, to pass the Kosher test, animals can be processed enough to be considered pure or to have processed away the meat-ness of the food.

I am sure there are better ways I could word the second part... but it is really early and I am still drinking my coffee.
:)

Anyway, neither of those are veg.
Hope that helped.

Answer 4

You can't be familiar with Kashrut (Jewish dietary 'law') or you wouldn't be asking this question!

Kashrut is worthless to insuring a product is safe for any vegetarian. The perfect example is one I just used in another answer! Look up Emes kosher pareve 'non-animal' gelatin for the classic example. Under Kashrut a rabbi declared that Emes gelatin was so heavily processed and purified that it could no longer be considered an animal ingredient! Laboratory analysis confirmed that their pareve gelatin was in fact land animal based gelatin (not the usual fish based stuff).

Is that a good enough reason for you?

BTW; some of us DO remember the Essenes, true Semitic Jews that were veg!

Answer 5

I have never given the thumbs down for this but my guess would be because the parve symbol would not be applied to any product containing eggs and therefore may not be a 100% reliable method of determining if a product is vegan.
Also products that contain rendered animal fat for flavor would not be listed in this manner either unless they also contained a milk product.

Answer 6

Kosher gelatin is made from fish bones.

I don't use those designations because they are not relevant
to me. Religion, jealousy or bigotry have nothing to do with it. I have both Jewish and Muslim inlaws and I get along fine with all of them.

Hinduism and Jainism have been around longer than Judaism and these are the religions that introduced vegetarianism as a religious principle. "Respectfully" killing an animal doesn't even come close to that ideal. Actually, many primitive cultures have rituals of praying to the animal spirit before killing one for food; so that kind of idea didn't come from Judaism either.

Answer 7

KOSHER does not mean Veggie or Vegan. I personally use a lot of Kosher products because I know they do meet certain standards & will not have things in them as you say Milk with meat etc.
BUT the do have just about as much additives as other non-kosher foods.
Soon more food will be labeled. I am looking forward to it, I have Celiac & spend a lot of time while shopping reading labels.

Slainté(to your health)

Answer 8

I'll basically agree to anything Blackbyrus says, and add that I'm schtupping a Jewish guy, and I've had a crush on Woody Allen since I was little.
I would even consider going to Temple though I'm vehemently atheist.

Answer 9

(((lilmiss))) Interesting question! I think that both Zvi and Ninja (hugs to you both!) hit the proverbial nail on the head. The only thing to add would be a personal experience: one of my former students was, as I found out later, anti-Semitic (meaning anti-Jewish). He tried making comments about the politics in Israel and was so totally shocked when I agreed (since I'm not fond of right-wing politics, be it in my home country of the US OR Israel)!

Answer 10

the orthodox union symbol or the k means there's a good chance that it's vegan as long as it's parve. i used to use that same method until i discovered that they can still contain animal byproducts such as whey. no one's being anti-semetic, jealous or bitter. they're just trying to stick to the concept of trying to reduce harm.