[Avodah] synthetic meat

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2013 at 09:07:03AM -0400, M Cohen wrote:
: beef stem cells are being used to grow synthetic meat
: does this have a prob of eiver min hachai or (more likely) yotzei min
: hachai?

I am thinking this is like the question of the kashrus of maggots, as R'
Dovid Lifshitz framed it in shiur in the mid-1980s. (Filtered through
nearly 30 years of memory drift.)

There RDL saw the question as whether the microscopic maggot eggs and
early larvae have halachic import. If they do, then since the egg came
from outside the meat, we can no longer hold that the maggots are made
from the meat, and no longer permit them.

But since (leshitaso) the eggs do not, then the only thing that brought
the maggot from a kosher invisibly small thing to a maggot was the
meat it ate since hatching, and therefore the treif bug was actually
solely caused by the meat. And still as kosher as when we thought they
reproduced literally abiogenetically.

Here too.... I understand that we're starting with invisibly small
"pieces" of cow. So if the egg connects the maggot found within the meat
to its mother, then these cells would make the resulting meat a product
of the source cow. And if not, not.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I hear, then I forget; I see, then I remember;
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