Have you come across, or are you, one of those people who doesn’t want any of their foods to touch on their plates? Although I’m not, I do do something similar. I eat each item of food separately in a set order. Well I say that. In fact a lot of my meals are very mixed, but if I’m eating something like beans and chips, I’ll eat one item first, then the other. One of the things about following the kind of diet I do is that most of my food is chopped up pretty small before it reaches my plate. I often get through a whole dinner without using a knife or fork, or a knife or spoon. Apparently there’s a tradition in some cultures that all the violence takes place in the preparation of food, and once it’s at the table and you’re bonding with the other people, weapons such as knives and forks have no place, because you’re with friends. I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense.
The next stage on from not letting your food touch on the plate would be not letting it mix in your stomach, and it is quite odd, when you think about it, that we wouldn’t dream of letting the foods in consecutive courses mix either on the plate or in our mouths but we’re happy to let it do so in our stomachs. Except sometimes we aren’t. For instance, although I’m not much of an alcohol drinker, going months or years without any kind of tipple, there is a rule I’ve never followed never to mix the grape and the grain. I’ve done it many times and never had any ill-effects, so I wonder whether it’s a custom rather than a rational measure, but maybe I’ve just got a strong stomach in that respect. However, it entirely makes sense to me that someone wouldn’t want to eat dairy while there was meat still in their stomach, particularly if it was from the same species, because it just seems to be in terrible taste to “drown” corpses in their mother’s milk. To me that doesn’t need an explanation. It just seems obvious that you wouldn’t want to do it. It’s sickening. Of course, I am in fact vegan so it goes a lot further than that for me, but it still makes sense, as it does that you just wouldn’t make a meal including both meat and dairy for the same reason. It is, of course, quite an abstract point to me since I gave up meat thirty-five years ago.
This principle is of course mentioned several times in the Bible, but is widely regarded as superceded by Christians. I’ve mentioned it several times so I’m not going to harp on about this particular issue, but don’t you think the vision of the sheet in the Book of Acts is a teeny bit suspicious? Here it is in the NIV:
About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”
“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.
I’m prepared to accept that Peter had that dream, but it’s also clear that requiring men to be circumcised and to restrict their current diet considerably would make it harder to sell Christianity to the world. I also don’t think it constitutes progress that the distasteful practice of, for example, mixing milk and meat became acceptable in that faith community. It’s a step backward. Again, though, as a vegan it’s easy for me to say that.
Other forms of mixing are also forbidden, and one in particular is brought up quite often in connection with the criticism of perceived Biblical homophobia, in what is in fact a highly dubious argument. People objecting to the apparently homophobic “clobber” verses in the written Torah because of Christians (usually) who use them as an excuse for homophobia often also bring up the prohibition on eating shellfish and wearing mixed fibres. I would call this borderline anti-Semitic apart from anything else, as it highlights aspects of observant Judaism which the interlocutor regards as ridiculous. As a vegan, I don’t consider the prohibition on shellfish to be in any way ridiculous, although perhaps not for the same reasons. Certainly from a health point of view it isn’t the most sensible idea to eat animals who filter feed and live near sewage outlets, and nor is it a good idea to eat animals which are unusually allergenic to humans. The prohibition on mixed fibres isn’t exactly that. It’s actually a prohibition not to wear garments made of both wool and linen, at least in one place. In another it says “two types of material”:
לֹא תִלְבַּשׁ שַׁעַטְנֵז, צֶמֶר וּפִשְׁתִּים יַחְדָּו.
- Deuteronomy 22:11 – “You shall not wear cloth combining wool and linen.” Some translations insert “such as”.
אֶת-חֻקֹּתַי, תִּשְׁמֹרוּ–בְּהֶמְתְּךָ לֹא-תַרְבִּיעַ כִּלְאַיִם, שָׂדְךָ לֹא-תִזְרַע כִּלְאָיִם; וּבֶגֶד כִּלְאַיִם שַׁעַטְנֵז, לֹא יַעֲלֶה עָלֶיךָ
Leviticus 19:19 – “You shall observe my laws. You shall not let your cattle mate with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; you shall not put on cloth from a mixture of two kinds of material.”
Again, this says “wool and linen”, not “two kinds of material”.
There is an approach called chumra, which gets its name from the mitzvah to put a fence around a roof to prevent someone from falling off it. This involves going further than the letter of the law in order that one doesn’t err. A friend of mine took a similar approach to veganism and vegetarianism, where he went vegan because erring from veganism would be into vegetarianism rather than into carnism. Chumra applies to this, I would imagine, would involve not wearing any kind of mixed fibre. I don’t know why it’s been translated as “two kinds of material” when wool and linen are explicitly mentioned both times, and I don’t know why some translations insert “such as”. In context, the prohibition seems to parallel not mixing crops or doing something which would lead to hybridisation, and it forms one of a number of prohibitions which I have yet to mention, but before I do that I want to point something else out: this actually works really well from a contemporary Green perspective.
In ereyesterday’s post I mentioned the difficulty created for recycling by producing composites. Probably all lycra, for example, is in a mix, and polycotton is another. Once this has been done it becomes remarkably difficult to separate the two for recycling, which must be done because they’re to be treated differently. The same happens when other materials are composites, such as cups containing layers of bamboo and plastic. Therefore, although I’m sure this never occurred to the Israelites at the time, it does actually make sense not to mix fibres from a sustainability perspective. I don’t know. I mean, is it possible that they would’ve recognised a need to keep fibres separate for reasons of reuse?
It seems more likely that the prohibition on mixed fibres is a way of reminding them that they are a people apart with special duties, held to a more exacting standard than other nations, and that this would’ve been extended to the other prohibitions, known as כלאים – hybrid or mixture – kil’ayim. And of course if you miss out the aleph, it sounds like a certain dessert, hence the pic at the top. The specific prohibitions are, to quote Wikipedia:
- interbreeding of animals of different species
- planting mixed seeds
- grafting of different species of trees
- sha`atnez – mixing wool and linen in garments
- planting grain or seed-crop in a vineyard
- ploughing or doing other work with two different species of animal.
For now I want to continue with the specifics of sha`atnez (שַׁעַטְנֵז). Moses Maimonides held, as I think he may have done with other apparently inexplicable mitzvot, that it was specifically to avoid Canaanite customs, where there was said to be a ritual involving animal, vegetable and mineral combination, but there is also the requirement that tzitzit, ritual tassels, be made of just such mixed fibres, so it may also be about reserving them for holy purposes. It’s also permissible to wear two separate garments, one of wool and one of linen, even though this would lead to mixing, and to me this seems “wrong”, because it’s like letting your foods touch. It also seems only to apply to wool and linen rather than to any other mixture of fibres, which is in a way a pity. The thing to note here is that there is in fact a good modern day reason not to mix fibres, whatever the reason for the initial text.
Living things are in a way made up of fibres. We have fibres of protein and nucleic acid, on which are stored our genes. All proteins start off as fibres which then fold themselves into a particular form which enables them to perform their function, and DNA is also a double fibre, which twists, coils and then coils again to pack itself into, in our case, our cell nuclei. Mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA is in the form of loops rather than strands. This means there is a remarkable parallel between sha`atnez in the case of textile fibres and the same with true hybridisation, in that the latter literally involves the mixture of fibres too. The fibres of maternal and paternal DNA mix when pollination or conception occur, and they’re from different species. This often results in non-viable offspring but not always, and if the species are closely related this is sometimes because they have different chromosome numbers. For instance, donkeys have five dozen and two chromosomes and horses five dozen and four, meaning that they rarely produce a foal able to reproduce.
Then there’s the question of genetic modification, which is where I have to get emotionally involved again. There’s plenty of opposition to genetic modification and also plenty of defences of it, but the reasons for opposing it often seem to be emotionally grounded, as do the arguments made in response. The basic argument against genetic modification is that it alters genomes in an unprecedented way which has unforseen consequences, and there’s also an argument around intellectual property in that it leads to companies claiming ownership and patents on living organisms. The arguments for them are generally along the lines that humans have been consciously altering organisms by breeding for millennia and that it “feeds the world”. The latter argument is particularly disgusting because it guilt-trips people. In fact the world can easily be fed by overthrowing capitalism, or in the absence of that by following a plant-based diet, and even without those various reforms would be able to get the food to people who need it. The chief reason this argument is made is that there’s profit to be had from GMOs.
GMOs have “mixed strands”. Some of the time I don’t consider this a problem, but when an animal gene is inserted into plant DNA it ceases to be vegan if an animal was exploited to do that. This happened, for example, when an “anti-freeze” gene from a flounder was inserted into a tomato. This means that if I eat such a food, plant or not, I’m effectively eating an animal product. Orthodox Jews have rightly made the claim that this is kil’ayim. Nor is it trivial that it’s an animal product, because it means that at some point in the past an animal has suffered or been killed to put that tomato on my plate, and profit is being made from that abuse to which I’m contributing. And although breeding is also genetic modification, and does lead to environmental problems, the end result is a somewhat balanced physiology in the offspring, although any trait preferred by a breeder will have costs for the organism concerned, and in fact breeding per se is not always a good thing. Many breeds of dog, for example, have major health problems as a result.
The debate over GMOs tends to be disingenuous because neither side presents its real reasons for its position. Therefore, just as boiling a juvenile animal in her mother’s milk has a valid and sufficient yuck factor about which we should just be honest, so has genetic modification in some cases. Not when it applies to humans though. Genetic modification of humans has separate issues and sometimes it just seems to make sense. We need to acknowledge that we have valid emotional reasons for opposition to such things without attempting to use scientific-sounding arguments to support our position.
Hence the prohibition on kil’ayim looks like “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The idea is that the living world was created perfect already, with enough for everyone’s needs, and human attempts to improve it are just tampering needlessly with the natural order. That said, it still seems a shame that it encourages monoculture and discourages companion planting. Monoculture has negative consequences for the environment and sometimes the species itself. It’s well-known that the lack of genetic diversity among bananas risks their extinction in the near future from diseases to which none of them would have resistance. Companion planting was considerably dissed by one of my friends who tried it, so I’m not sure it’s up to much, but the principles of permaculture discourage monoculture and encourage diversity among food sources for humans, and as such make the same area more productive.
However, the requirement not to plant different species together only applies to the land of Israel, which makes me wonder about permaculture projects there. It also doesn’t apply to plants which are not edible, so some companion planting would work. It’s looking like the prohibition is also linked to the idea that it isn’t up to human beings to create and destroy species, and hybridisation with GMOs does risk doing that.
The problem with the yuck factor is that it would seem to apply equally well as an excuse for homophobia. Consequently, although we should entertain emotional reasons for rejecting kil’ayim, we can’t allow that to have free rein only where it suits us. There needs to be something else, and I don’t know what that is. Sorry to leave it like that.
A Box Of Chocolates 