The laws of kashrut

From OK Kosher Certification:

PHILADELPHIA BACON CREAM CHEESE SPREAD IS NOT KOSHER

Please be advised that Kraft Foods will be coming out with a new product:
PHILADELPHIA BACON CREAM CHEESE SPREAD
(Kraft Foods – Northfield, IL)
This product is not kosher certified.
It contains actual bacon and does NOT carry a kosher symbol on the package

Thanks for the warning! (The rest of the item does contain less obvious information, which is that some other Philadelphia cream cheese products are losing their certification as well.) Thanks also to Rabbi Dov Fischer for the pointer.

My comment: What is kashrut, you ask? The Jewish dietary laws delineating what is kosher, i.e., what’s OK to eat if you are a religious Jew.

I just picked up the little item above from law professor Eugene Volokh’s blog thing and am sort of amazed that it was necessary for a rabbi to declare a new Philadelphia cream cheese spread not kosher because it contains bacon.

Isn’t that obvious? Pork stuff isn’t kosher and I’ll bet everyone, maybe even in Kansas, knows that. But what the rabbi did, undoubtedly inadvertently, was to declare that there’s honest to god real bacon in that cream cheese spread, not some cardboard-flavored-like-bacon product.

So read this as a sort of recommendation for those of us who love bacon, and whose cholesterol level is low enough to permit cream cheese in our diets.

But hey, Mr. Volokh: I know you’re a serious guy (with politics that almost never correspond with mine), but if you’re going to post news like this, you have to develop some sort of wit. Because this is funny.

P.S. It occurs to me not for the first time that neo-cons − who now seem to have either linked themselves to the whole “libertarian” label or invented “libertarianism” because they didn’t like being slammed as neo-cons − never have had a sense of humor. They are all boringly earnest people, as well as often angry. They are not so much propounding a political philosophy as they are yelling it at us.

Not pleasant, guys, and not persuasive. But thanks for the cream cheese with bacon tip.