Kashrut Research Paper

The idea of eating clean is heavily present throughout Jewish text and tradition. In Judaism, kashrut is followed to keep the body clean and holy. Kashrut is the Jewish practice of preparing and consuming foods in a clean and proper fashion. This paper will explain the practice of kashrut, starting with its origin and moving on to describe what foods can be eaten, what measures must be taken for a food to be considered clean, why meat and dairy cannot be consumed together, how kashrut changes during Passover, how kashrut affected Christianity and Islam, and how kashrut is practiced today.
Kashrut is the Jewish idea of what makes something “ritually correct and faultless” including food, sections of the Torah, and how religious items are constructed (“Kasher, or Kosher,” 1971). Most commonly, kashrut defines what foods are acceptable to eat and how said foods must be prepared and consumed (Mamre, 2012). The root of the word kashrut means “fit, proper, ready” (Shreibman, 2016). There is no set reason that the Jewish people practice being kosher. Some believe that it should be …show more content…
According to the National Jewish Population Survey, “about 21 percent of the 5.3 million” Jewish Americans still follow the practice of kashrut (Markoe, 2013). There are kosher food pantries to buy kosher foods from and stores often now carry meats that are labeled as such. Despite the relatively small amount of Jewish people that follow kashrut practices in the United States, Quartz Media reports that “more than 40% of the country’s new packaged food and beverage products in 2014 are labeled as being kosher” (Shanker, 2015). Americans are turning towards eating kosher foods because they believe that it is healthier, often ignoring the religious reasons behind the practice. Americans understand that the animals are treated and slaughtered more humanely, and that the meat product is purer when the meat is