[Avodah] Is Lab-Grown Meat Kosher?

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2023 at 05:46:05PM +0000, Prof. L. Levine wrote
*on Areivim*:
> From https://oukosher.org/blog/articles/is-lab-grown-meat-kosher-ou-kosher-ceo-rabbi-menachem-genack-discusses-in-washington-post-other-media-outlets

> As food technologies develop, so do new halachic issues. In recent days,
> OU Kosher CEO Rabbi Menachem Genack has taken on questions about whether
> lab-grown meat, created from animal stem cells, is kosher. While Israel's
> Chief Rabbi David Lau recently declared it kosher pareve, Rabbi Genack
> disagrees. Read more in a front-page piece in The Washington Post...

As I understand it, RMG is saying that microscopic ingredients are a normal
case of bitul. And that here, the starter cells are a davar hamaamid, and
a davar hamaamid isn't batel since its effects change the whole. (The
way the textbook davar hamaamid, renet, changes milk into cheese.)

Which makes me wonder....

Does R Genack hold that maggots that emerge from the middle of a piece
of meat are treif?

The gemara says they're kosher, but assumes abiogenesis. Since the kosher
meat putrified into the maggots, they're as kosher as the original meat.

In shiur, R Dovid Lifshitz explained that this is still effectively true
despite advances in science. The maggot is born of a microscopic egg
and then grows to visible size by eating the surrounding meat. Since
halakhah ignores the microscopic, the only cause of the visible maggot
that matters is the meat that it ate while growing. And so, it effectively
comes from the meat.

Notice that preserving the gemara's pesaq requires saying that something
microscopic altogether doesn't exist. If you consider it a microscopic
davar hamaamid, you would again be saying that the maggot egg isn't batel
and the maggot is treif.

I find the cases very parallel. (Until you get to the question of bal
teshaqtzu, which comes to mind in the maggot case.)


Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 It is harder to eat the day before Yom Kippur
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   with the proper intent than to fast on Yom
Author: Widen Your Tent      Kippur with that intent.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                     - Rav Yisrael Salanter