[Avodah] is lox kosher

[Zev Sero]

Eli Turkel wrote:
>> Most lox and nova is from farmed salmon anyway.
> 
> Of course if the package carried an OU or OK you have no way of
> telling the source of the salmon.

I think if it's from wild salmon it will say so on the package, since
this is a selling point.


> Can one rely on rov? is there timtum halev?

I'd say yes and yes.  One can rely on rov, but *if* one happened to
eat one of these things, *and* it's not a kosher tolaat, *then* there
will be timtum halev.  But this depends on the discussion going on
now on Avodah, to which I've redirected this message.

However, with lox and smoked salmon there's another reason to be
lenient: it's sliced thin, so it should be easy to see the things if
they're there.


> BTW is was not clear why farmed fish are different. Do this tolaim not
> appear in commercial fisheries?

No, they don't.  There's nowhere for them to come from.  The whole
problem started when someone looked up the science on these things
and realised that not only aren't they spontaneously generated inside
the fish's flesh, as Chazal and the poskim undoubtedly thought they
were, but they don't even originate in the kosher fish at all; they
start as eggs laid inside a mammal, are excreted with its faeces,
hatch in sea water, are eaten by shellfish, the shellfish are then
eaten by kosher fish, the worms migrate from the gut to the flesh,
coil themselves up and create a cyst around themselves, and wait for
the fish to be eaten by a mammal.  So unless you're feeding your
farmed fish wild-caught crustaceans from waters where mammals are
excreting, you're not going to have these things in your fish.

 
> Also if one doesn't rely on practically all the major kashrut
> organizations in the US for the kashrut of fish how can one rely on
> them for other items. perhaps the assembly line had some fish in a
> previous run.  Certainly one couldnt eat in an OU/OK/Chaf-K
> restaurant where fish is cooked

The whole fish doesn't become assur just because of a tiny little
worm inside it!  The worm remains assur, but none of its taam will be
in the kelim in which the fish was cooked (because it's inside a cyst
buried in the flesh), and even if it were it would be batel.  I'd
say that even if one takes the daat ha'osrim, one could cook a fish
and then carefully flake it looking for these worms in their cysts,
remove them, and then eat the flaked fish (perhaps as a "salad" with
mayo), relying on the taam of the worms to be batel.
 

Linguistic PS: "Lox" is nowadays often misused to refer to smoked
salmon or nova.  Nova is smoked.  Lox is not smoked, it's salt-cured.
As one of my friends says, "Save the lox.  Nova difference."

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher