What are kosher and halal food? Kosher food is food that has been prepared according to Jewish law and Halal food is food that has been prepared according to Islamic law.
The word “kosher” is a Hebrew word and it means “fit” or “proper”. Jewish people, if they stick to the rules, can only eat kosher food. What they can and can’t eat and how they can and can’t eat it is set out in the Torah, which is the five books of Moses that are also contained in the Old Testament. The five books of Moses are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The rules for kosher food are set down in Leviticus 11. It very painstakingly goes over all of the animals that a Jewish person can eat.
Kosher food is any meat that comes from a mammal that has a cloven-hoof and chews its cud, such as cows and sheep. Rabbits chew their cud but don’t have cloven-hooves, so they are off limits. Pigs have cloven-hooves, but they don’t chew their cud, so they are off limits, too. It specifies 24 different types of birds that can’t be eaten, such as raven and owls. Fish and things that live in the water can be eaten, so long as they have fins and scales, so no shell fish, no octopus, and no squid. Nothing that crawls on the floor can be eaten, such as rats or lizards. Flying insects cannot be eaten but jumping insects, such as locusts and grasshoppers can be eaten. People cannot eat meat that is already dead, as well.
The way the food is prepared is also important. The animal has to be slaughtered in a specific way, which is called shechita. The person who does it has to be trained and it is killed with a quick, very sharp cut. The animal then has to be inspected to make sure there are no abnormalities, because the Torah says that the animal must be without any imperfections.
Halah means “lawful” or “permitted” in Arabic. It is most commonly used for food, but it refers to anything in Islam that is permitted. The Quran makes specific mention of several things that cannot be eaten by Muslims. These are alcohol, blood, carnivorous animals, dead meat, anything slaughtered as an offering, any pigs. The fact that they can’t eat blood is why to be halal, animals have to be slaughtered and then drained of all blood. Any of the other ingredients used in cooking must also be halal as well.
Both kosher and halal are different, but they share a lot of similarities and you can understand why religions developed these methods of killing and preparing food. Most of the things that they forbid, or that they call “unclean” or “not lawful” are things that would have been very dangerous to early cultures living in a desert, which is where both Islam and Judaism started. Not eating any meat that is already dead is a very sensible rule because meat will go rotten very quickly in the desert heat and be dangerous. Not eating blood makes sense because meat that is drained will last much longer than meat which still contains blood, something else that was very important before fridges. The kosher rules about not eating things that crawl on the floor makes sense because rats are carriers of disease, as are many insects. Grasshoppers are generally safe to eat though. Both religions say no carnivores, which again makes sense because they eat meat, often rotten meat, and probably contain bacteria that our bodies cannot deal with. It is safer for us to stay with the ruminants. The rule about pigs that both religions share also makes sense because pork can carry a lot of diseases unless it is well cooked, something that would have been difficult to do in the desert. These rules would have been worked out through trial and error and then become common knowledge, before they were set down in the religions. I expect that a lot of other early religions also had rules about eating.
Many of the reasons for these eating rules no longer exist because we can keep meat safely and prepare it without risk. However, two of the things that both halal and kosher food encourage is appreciation for the food you are eating and a knowledge of what goes in it. Appreciation is always good because we need to understand what went into the food we are eating, including the life of the animals. And in our culture of ultra processed food, knowing what is in the food is very important. If you eat kosher or halal food, it is very difficult not to eat natural foods. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://oukosher.org/the-kosher-primer
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2011&version=NIV
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/what-is-kosher