A regular patron says the chaos broke out when he and a rabbi noticed the frankfurters on the grill were non-Kosher, in a restaurant that's supposed to be dishing out the Kosher variety.
That got me curious... Exactly what is "kosher"?
Seems it's food that "fit" for Jews to eat, and a long and tedious explanation about clean or unclean foods attempts to clarify the whole concept.
Actually, even the Jews have a hard time with the concept, since the idea that an animal not killed in exactly the right way becomes unclean. Slaughter must sever the jugular vein, carotid artery, esophagus and trachea in a single continuous cutting movement with an unserrated, sharp knife, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary pain to the animal. Failure of any of these criteria renders the meat of the animal unsuitable.
Yup... without exception, every kosher slaughter house will adhere to this 100%, or at least claim to. Everybody knows that a Jewish businessman would never lie about something that could reduce his profits, like tossing an impure carcass out.
Further: Anything which chews the cud and has a cloven hoof would be ritually clean, but those animals which only chew the cud or only have cloven hooves would be unclean. Talk about splitting hairs.
A casual comment hidden amongst all the clean or unclean blather is this zinger about unacceptable wine:
... wine or grape juice (or their derivatives) produced by only gentiles...I see... wine made by Gentiles is unfit for Jewish consumption.
A more probable explanation for the original "laws" about what Jews could eat arose from the necessity of trying to prevent a basically ignorant, uneducated and barely out of the stone-age population trying to survive in a resouces-starved desert from eating food that could sicken or kill them. "God will kill you if you disobey" has always seemed a great deterrent for folks who didn't know any better.
As for the wine made by Gentiles? It was probably banned because those inferior Gentiles didn't wash their feet before stomping on the grapes.
To hear of a near-riot over a hot dog nowadays seems a bit archaic, particularly when you know that countless Jews have eaten improperly slaughtered animals. Just how many slaughterhouses are going to toss an entire carcass because it took more than one swipe of that required serrated knife to cut all those organs?
I can hear it now... "Oh yes, we send all our improperly slaughtered(but otherwise perfectly good) carcasses to a Gentile packing plant. Honest."
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