Yesterday's question to ponder

[magid]

Is a milk-fed pumpkin dairy for kashrut purposes?

Comments

[geekosaur]

I have no idea how post-Talmudic Orthodoxy looks at it, but I seem to recall running across quotes from some discussion about crossbreeding plants (! — love the way Talmudic discussions veer about; the original topic, IIRC, was whether etrogim crossbred with lemons could be used to fulfill the mitzvah of arba minim) that suggest to me that if you use the fertilizer method it's okay (or at least was), but spraying the leaves is iffy and injecting or wicking into the stem is Right Out.

(The diversion, btw, was about under what circumstances plants can cancel out certain kinds of impurity, including that of treif. I may be misrecalling, but I think the conclusion was that for normal purposes as long as the plant is still intact and attached to the ground, anything it draws from the ground is neutralized including e.g. pork broth sprayed on the ground around it; but unsolved was whether this was sufficient for the purposes of specific mitzvot, as with etrogim for arba minim and also whether spraying said broth on the leaves and letting it be absorbed was acceptable.)

(Naturally, neither of the above should be construed as halacha; just tossing it in as a data point / for discussion.)

[(Anonymous)]

I asked the same question when I read Farmer Boy as a child. I don't remember whether or not I received a definitive answer.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Aha! I'm not the only one to remember this from Farmer Boy! (I got a couple of strange looks the other day when I mentioned it).

[magid.livejournal.com]

Interesting. So if it's not touching the plant directly at all, then it's (theoretically) fine, but touching the plant would make it dairy, even if it's not on the edible part. Sort of if the plant absorbs the milk/broth/questionable substance directly, it's taking on the status of the absorbed thing, while if it's 'filtered' through the ground first, the liquid loses that essential dairy/traif/other impurity quality.

What havoc this could cause for innocent kosher shoppers! Milchig pumpkins over here, not appropriate for Thanksgiving dinner, while those in that corner have been fed fleishig broth, so the pie would be fleishig, not pareve... There's not room enough in the produce section!

And then if one fed this dairy pumpkin to a kosher animal? If it had ingested the milk directly, there would be no issue, so I assume it wouldn't effect the animal's status at all.

[geekosaur]

The "attached to the ground" part is also important: hydroponics introduces several halachic complications.