Nigel Savage, writing for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, ponders kashrut and the modern food chain:

But the world, as we know, is changing fast. The way that most people in the West eat food has probably changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500. In general we have lost touch with the seasons; we eat an enormous amount of processed food; we cook far less from first principles than we used to. My late grandma, of blessed memory, died three years ago in Manchester, England, aged nearly 96. When she began her life, she got a kosher chicken by going with her mother to the kosher slaughterer, picking a chicken, watching the shochet slaughter it, then taking it home and plucking its feathers and purging it in the manner required by Jewish law. By the end of her life she had great-grandkids living in California who simply take a kosher chicken nugget from the freezer and put it in the microwave. The chicken that became the chicken nugget was killed in the same way that the chicken ninety years ago was killed: but the lives of those two chickens will have been very different, and the eating patterns of those who ate the chickens is very different indeed.

The pace of change in food production and distribution has moved faster than the rabbinical tradition can quite cope with. How do we infer laws from the Torah about whether GMO foods are ok or not? What does the Torah have to say about industrial monoculture? What does the Torah say about the extent of food packaging and transportation today? Or about obesity, or fast food, or vegetarianism?

[NCRLC Magazine]