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From
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/bve3obb" eudora="autourl">
http://tinyurl.com/bve3obb</a><br><br>
<h3><b>Rabbis Go to Museum to Probe Kashrut, Tiny Worms and Fish<br><br>
</b></h3><font size=3>From the hulking Willamette meteorite to the
sparkling Star of India sapphire, visitors to the American Museum of
Natural History in New York are used to seeing unusual sights. But
museum-goers last year were likely unprepared for the sight and smell
of Rabbi Chaim Loike, as he walked past the ticket booths carrying
grocery bags full of thawing frozen sardines, fish oil dripping onto the
lobby floor beneath the barosaurus skeleton in the front entrance off of
Central Park West.<br><br>
Loike, a rabbinic coordinator with the Orthodox Union, the largest
certifier of kosher food in the world, went to the museum in March 2011
to solve a challenging kashrut problem. He and his colleagues, including
OU fish expert Rabbi Chaim Goldberg, had noticed a recent uptick in the
number of parasitic worms contaminating certain kosher-certified brands
of tinned sardines and capelin eggs likely the result of newer deep
ocean trawling methods and they wanted to know where these piscatorial
parasites were coming from.<br><br>
Worms, in general, are not kosher. But according to Talmudic rules,
microscopic worms that grow in the muscles of fish are considered to come
“from” the flesh. And even though the idea of them may seem unpalatable,
these parasites, which typically go unnoticed by consumers, are
nonetheless acceptable by Jewish dietary laws. In contrast, worms that
migrate into the fish meat from the guts, say, or elsewhere clearly come
from outside the flesh, and the presence of such parasites would render
any fish product unkosher.<br><br>
Differentiating between these two kinds of parasites is no easy task. The
rabbis knew the various worm species that normally develop inside their
host’s muscles, yet they could not tell just by looking under the
microscope which kinds of worms they were dealing with. Could the worms
have migrated into the fish meat after the host had died? Or did they
mature in the flesh in situ?<br><br>
<Snip><br><br>
The museum researchers, led by worm curator Mark Siddall and his graduate
student Sebastien Kvist, used a technique known as “DNA barcoding” in
which a small region of the genome is decoded to yield a uniquely
identifying string of genetic “letters” to pinpoint the species. They ran
samples from the tinned fish, the capelin roe and even Loike’s frozen
specimens through a gene-sequencing machine and determined that all of
the worms co-mingling with the food were of the type that develops in the
muscle.<br><br>
As a result, the kosher certification could stand. “The Talmud basically
says that most worms you find in a fish come from the flesh, and what the
museum showed us is that that still happens today,” said Loike. The AMNH
scientists published their findings earlier this year in the Journal of
Parasitology.<br><br>
Still, not all kashrut experts think this study does anything to resolve
the longstanding controversy over whether these worms pass halachic
muster. According to Rabbi Gershon Bess, a member of the Rabbinic Council
of California who advises on issues relating to kosher foods, the
genetics only confirms what rabbis and scientists already knew: Namely,
that the worms found in the flesh and viscera are not a result of outside
contamination but rather the natural life cycle of those known as
<i>Anisakis</i> nematodes.<br><br>
<Snip><br><br>
Given the totality of the worms’ development, Bess and many of his
contemporaries argue that fish products containing these worms should be
off-limits. “There’s no question that the worms are visible to the eye
[before entering the fish],” he said. “Therefore, according to the
Talmud, it should be forbidden.”<br><br>
Regarding the OU’s certification, he added: “It’s an extremely weak
position and doesn’t really work with the reasoning of any of the
halachic authorities throughout the generations.”<br><br>
Read more:
<a href="http://forward.com/articles/160736/a-kosher-can-of-worms/#ixzz23WYeqQwk">
http://forward.com/articles/160736/a-kosher-can-of-worms/#ixzz23WYeqQwk</a>
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