I understand that they sell tuna in plastic packages but I never saw that in my country, only cans. So my proposition, when you open the can, you find tuna that was cooked in oil but most of the oil has been strained out of the can, and you don't have to squeeze it out yourself.-- pashute, Jul 01 2015 Mary Midgley on the world, animals, nature, culture and human values https://en.wikipedi...g/wiki/Mary_Midgley [pashute, Jul 05 2015] Uh, this is widely available here, and has been for a few years. Just Google "no drain tuna" or somesuch.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 01 2015 I don't believe the oil (or water) is for cooking, it's for preserving.
ETA: Having looked at the "no drain" tuna, I stand by my statement. It looks like it uses a very densely packed can, so a very little bit of liquid suffices to fill the remaining space.-- MechE, Jul 01 2015 Whoever will import that to Israel will make a mint.
Does it cost more?-- pashute, Jul 01 2015 Not significantly.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 01 2015 OK I read on Greenpeace that it was invented by John West Thai food company in 2009. Not much chance they'll be able to sell in Israel (gladly since) they fish outside the internationally accepted areas and methods, so their fish cannot be kosher - until canned it is mixed with non kosher fish like sharks or with marine mammals like dolphins. Thanks max.-- pashute, Jul 01 2015 I don't know what happened but your remark is now deleted. Could you re-post?
Perhaps pressing the space key caused the delete action?-- pashute, Jul 01 2015 I just commented that tuna mix with sharks in the sea, however they're caught. This is one of the reasons I always think of kosher and halal food regulations as having been conceived by five-year olds as a game. "No, you're only allowed to eat the green ones, and only if they've only got one toe."-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 02 2015 Unless the canned material is submerged in fluid with appropriate properties osmotic migration and reactive degradation will occur over time. Food that is canned for long storage cannot be partially drained because it will quickly become unpalatable, the top side developing contrasting chemical properties from the wet side, and neither better as a result.-- WcW, Jul 02 2015 Et tuna Brute! ha-- xenzag, Jul 02 2015 So WcW how does the "no drain tuna" sell.
MwBc - The tuna is only non kosher if it was pressed together and thus cooked together with non-kosher fish (sharks or marine mammals) gaining some of the materials from them in the process, or if the fishing process causes prolonged suffering to living beings, or if living beings are being killed for no reason.
I have no idea about the rules of Hallal, but watching some movies and seeing some butchers, it doesn't seem they share these understandings with us.-- pashute, Jul 04 2015 //The tuna is only non kosher if it was pressed together and thus cooked together with non-kosher fish//
Yes, but you see, that's the problem. If people don't want to eat shark, or are allergic to shark, or just don't personally like the idea, that's fine. But to have a little rule book with all this stuff in is, frankly, childish.
It always reminds me of the Feynman story where he went to a Jewish seminary (or somesuch) on a Saturday, and they had a non-Jewish guy whose job was to push the lift buttons on Saturdays. Why? Because electricity was fire, and there was a rule that said "no fires on Saturdays". There are so many childish things there that it's hard to know where to start.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 04 2015 but a few centuries of word-of-mouth and then you're wondering why it's so important not to eat chalk.-- FlyingToaster, Jul 04 2015 At least you're wondering.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 04 2015 // if the fishing process causes prolonged suffering to living beings //
Watching coarse fishermen hunched under their green umbrellas in the sleety drizzle, along the towpath of a desolate stretch of urban canal rich with propane tanks, refrigerators, plastic bottles and grey-green bergs of polystyrene packaging, attempting to catch small, ugly inedible fish which they then throw back, tends to the view that participation in such inactivity would be acutely painful to any individual of normal sensibilities.
// or if living beings are being killed for no reason. //
Presumably said coarse fishermen had achieved brain-stem death by the time they bought the umbrella, the combined seat and tackle box, and those stupid bleeping bite alarms.
// I have no idea about the rules of Hallal, but watching some movies and seeing some butchers, it doesn't seem they share these understandings with us.. //
Which seems odd, since the Qu'ran is effectively a bolt-on extra to the Torah, and both are Abrahamic religions. Presumably there are some extra rules for Muslims that supersede parts of the Hebrew dietary code set out in Leviticus.-- 8th of 7, Jul 04 2015 The can of no drain tuna is just as full of material as the container of oil or water it simply contains less fluid and more tuna. The result is more like a tuna biscuit because the chunked nature of the chipped fish is not preserved, but the food value per oz, is higher. I would say that no drain tuna is better for things where the fish will be blended in with other ingredients, worse where any level of larger flake or chunk is desired.-- WcW, Jul 04 2015 8th, The Jewish dietary laws, set prior to the industrial food revolution, call for killing the fish individually and immediately by hitting it on the head and not having it suffocate to death. This may sound cruel to extremist Jews like Gary Yourofsky, but to most people it just shows some sort of acknowledgment of the necessity of eating living things and that includes plants, while showing cultural awareness of the evil involved in it, while reducing it to a minimum.
The industrial food process is full of unnecessary evil and pain to the animals, and harm to the natural environment.
Max, well, are you Jewish? Lets talk about pork. I grew up reading Charlotte's Web and my first grade reader had this thing about how pig's are very similar to humans and smart as well. Also their meet is supposed to taste like ours, and their skin can be used for human burns. So maybe its not so silly after all. - and if we're talking about skin, Dr. Arie Eldad a skin Dr. and former member of the Israeli parliament was told by a Chinese scientist how they get skin transplants for westerners in the quantities that they have, and his written answer was (at the time not seeing anything morally wrong with it) that it was taken from prisoners on the death penalty, who were kept alive until their skin was needed. (This lead to a change in law in Israel)
We're not allowed to eat horses and donkeys either. The "silly" list includes also marine mammals: whales and dolphins, rhinos elephants and monkeys including Orangutans, Chimps and Gorillas.
When I was a teenager I learned of the Nabbatteans in the Negev desert and Edomite transjordan, the people of the red rock of Petra, who worshiped three gods of statue but of no image, who's mobile stone altars were Olympian like, with the main one in the middle for Hartat and then 2nd place and third. I learned that because they were nomad with goats, they were forbidden to grow crops like grapes or farm animals like pigs, that make them live a stable town's life. So perhaps that's the source of my nation's traditions.
In the near past Israelis - secular Israelis that is, where proud to abide by a a silly list of flowers that you weren't allowed to pick, because the were endangered. Visiting Australia a few years back there was much similar activity there about the local nature.
So you can mock your culture, or you can take it to an extreme. I prefer to simply embrace the positive sides of mine, and advance what seem to me to be positive attitudes to the world.
I'll give a link to Mary Midgley's point of view which I find very compelling.-- pashute, Jul 05 2015 The Jewish religion is far from the literal understandings of the Torah. So much so, that some extreme-ultra- orthodox Jews are forbidden to read the bible or understand it in any way other than how the rabbis interpret it.
Most religious Jews abide to the "Halacha" which is a developing set of rules throughout the ages said to originate alongside the original Torah, and according to historians (many themselves rabbinic scholars) incorporates much of the Hellenistic Stoic philosophy and outlook, developed in the 1000 years or so since Alexander the Great (Called Alexander Makedon in Hebrew) and his teacher Aristotle met with the Jewish chief temple priest "Shimon haTzadik" - Simon the Righteous presumably around the year 326 bc.-- pashute, Jul 05 2015 Anyway, it turns out what I remembered was a video of the Sikh Jhatka slaughter, who some Sikh's are opposed to, and in any case not Id el Adha. I can't find the video now but there was a guy throwing an ax tied to a rope, and chopping one goats neck after another as it landed in front of him.
In two weeks time it will be Id Al-Adha the festivity of slaughter. I'm waiting to see the vegans protest in Jerusalem. Don't worry, there won't be one. Offended people in our hot region tend to mix up their targets of slaughter, so people with eyes in their head (and still with heads on their shoulders) tend to stay away.-- pashute, Jul 05 2015 //The "silly" list includes also marine mammals: whales and dolphins, rhinos elephants and monkeys including Orangutans, Chimps and Gorillas.//
Yes, all fine. However, it also includes lobster, shrimp and crocodile, which is silly. I dare say that some of these rules made sense *when they were written* - seafood spoils easily, and they probably hadn't thought of eating crocodile. But to be doing the same thing several thousand years later? Come off it - explain to me why we shouldn't be eating shrimp.
Then there's this whole "don't let dairy touch meat" thing. I'm told originally it was because somebody saw someone boiling veal in milk from the mother cow, and thought it was pretty tasteless (ethically as well as gastronomically, presumably). But it's been ballooned into some childish rule which means you can't have a cheeseburger, and you can't fry quesadillas in a pan that's been used to fry steak in. I mean - what?? In what way is this different from Alan Turing's obsession (and I think he was a great guy but...) that green peas weren't allowed to touch orange carrots on his plate?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 05 2015 //explain to me why we shouldn't be eating shrimp.//
Because it's gross, that's why, just like gay sex is gross and interracial sex is gross, and anything that some people find gross should be banned by law. It's a fairly straightforward, simple concept, Max, surely even YOU can follow that kind of logic.
Regarding the seminary school with the Gentile button-pusher... It's even worse in Israel. Richard Dawkins went there and found an ultraorthadox Jewish company that makes all sorts of cheater devices, such as mechanically-actuated appliances that get around the no-electricity rules. They have a phone that basically is always dialing all the numbers in the address book all the time, and to get it to call someone you stick a tool pin into a hole by that number and it interrupts something and allows the call to go through so YOU have not used any electricity. You actually stopped the flow through a resistor or something, I don't remember the technical details but yeah, it was along the same lines as the non-Jew staffer.-- 21 Quest, Jul 05 2015 [21Q] Have you considered running for office in the US? I would vote for you, and I don't even live there.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 05 2015 OK, I Googled the Shabbat Phone, and it's for real. Moreover, there is an App being developed to allow Jewish believers to use their smartphone on Saturdays.
One of the technical issues was that the battery gets warmer when you use a smartphone, and "causing heat" is equivalent to "using fire", and therefore not permitted. The solution, apparently, was to make the app do background computation to *keep* the battery warm at all times. Therefore, actually doing something with the App does not *of itself* cause the battery to become any warmer.
I quote:
"While the programming to force a load is very simple, this caused the battery to drain quicker, necessitating that we provide a way to charge the phone on Shabbos. This programming was extremely difficult and caused the phone to crash as we were manipulation a lot of system code. While many doubted we could do this to begin with, we have two expert programmers who were able to develop code that could manipulate the Android system to think it was not connected to a charger."
Now, come on, this is (a) taking the piss out of whatever the original prohibition on "using fire" was and (b) great stuff for a comedy routine.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 05 2015 What happens if you do one of these naughty things, like using the gas cooker to fry scallops and bacon in butter for Saturday breakfast? What are the actual consequences?-- pocmloc, Jul 05 2015 Can you define "actual"?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 05 2015 Is this discord contained in the tuna can? Or is it printed on the outside?-- st3f, Jul 05 2015 //that green peas weren't allowed to touch orange carrots// well, duh, that's divide by zero stuff. Mixing red raspberries and blueberries is considered sloppy in some circles, as well.
//farm animals// ah, I think I get it; thanks for the insight.
Why do they oil or water tuna in the first place ?-- FlyingToaster, Jul 05 2015 Pertaining to acts, action.-- pocmloc, Jul 05 2015 //Pertaining to acts, action.//
Yes, but is that actual acts and action, or just acting?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 05 2015 Max, I have considered running for office actually. Oddly enough, my racist, welfare-abusing neighbor says I should run for Governor. She don't know me very well, do she?-- 21 Quest, Jul 06 2015 Is it an actual election for Governor, or just a last-man-standing bare knuckle brawl ?
// What are the actual consequences? //
As we understand it, the consequence is that you are not Jewish.
Judaism differs from other religions in that there is no "acceptance" or "confirmation". To be Jewish means to follow the precepts set out in the Torah and the Mishna, i.e. to be "observant".
You don't have to go to a synagogue. You just have to follow the rules.-- 8th of 7, Jul 06 2015 Once the oil rigs get busy destroying the polar region, you'll be able to buy oil-stained fish in ample quantities.-- xenzag, Jul 06 2015 Very interesting re Jews not allowing any work to done on a Saturday. What is their definition of "work"? I love it when mad religions (which means ALL religions) try to explain their crazy rules.I particularly like the idea of a series of devices that circumvent these rules. (emergency airbag activated burka anyone?)-- xenzag, Jul 06 2015 Burkas are an excellent thing, and should - irrespective of religious or other affiliations- be mandatory for certain individuals, based entirely on aesthetic grounds.-- 8th of 7, Jul 06 2015 //Very interesting re Jews not allowing any work to done on a Saturday. What is their definition of "work"?//
Some examples include "lighting a fire" which has been defined to include activating any switch. As a result elevators in predominately Jewish buildings frequently stop at every floor on Saturdays (or they hire a non-Jew to do it for them, see Shabbos goy). This also means they frequently leave hotplates on from dusk Friday to dusk Saturday, and this causes fires on a regular basis.
I don't know all of the details, but there are also things that they are allowed to do in the home on a Saturday that they aren't in public (carrying babies or a cane for instance). So they came up with "eruvin", basically a wire strung around a very large area which is then defined as a wall (well many doorways in a wall that may not exist except for the supporting poles), making everything inside of it a private space. These areas can encompass many square miles.
I am not making any of this up. Apparently while god is really strict about rules, he's just fine with getting rules lawyered.-- MechE, Jul 06 2015 It does make you wonder:
(a) If jews spend all this time and effort coming up with loopholes to let them live a normal life, why bother with the stuff in the first place?
(b) Why has nobody decided that lobsters do have scales (just fused together into a shell) and can therefore be eaten?-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 06 2015 //while god is really strict about rules// Is this the same god who used to need goats to have their throats cut in order to make him happy, but now he has moved on and is only happy when it's infidels who have their throats cut? Oh wait a minute - that's two different versions of the one god. I find all of this tiresomely confusing.-- xenzag, Jul 06 2015 I'm back here now because of Max.
Thoroghly enjoyed each and every remark of each and every one of you.
Your right. All cultures are silly. Why do we wear a tie to an official party? Why do we cut our hair in a certain way. Why do we talk with a certain tone and when coming to another culture change it so as to sound like them. (French nasals out in the UK, American Rs thrown to the dogs in Spain, Women lowering their voice's pitch to the accepted tone of this evening's TV narrator of the day, Arabs avoiding the "harsh" guttural sounds). We all have eating manners that are specific to cultures (The Dutch eat bread with forks, the Egyptians dip their pita into the Humous). Why? Its a code derived from... well there's always a way to try to find out the history of fasions and traditions, in the case of religioun SOMETIMES its easier.
So if you are proud to be part of a culture which stands against human violence and advances the use of our brains to try and kill less people and less animals even though our species seems to be programmed to do so, and even if the tradition probably stemmed from a different culture - The Greek stoicism, then rather than bickering about its silliness, we celebrate its successes, such as higiene, said to be at the root of the Jews not being hit by the black plague only to be massacred 3 years later for allegedly poisening the Christians with the baland ritually murdering the Christians.
Bottom line: It's silly but following the lead and traditions is deep in all living creatures, and many times the deep religious contemplation and the consolidation of ancient contradictory texts, many times leads to very interesting philosophical insights and sometimes even surprisingly posititve consequences.
For some reason gramarly isn't working on my site so probably tons of stelling mistales. Sorry.-- pashute, May 08 2020 Having (very shallowly) looked at the restrictions of the 3 major Ibrahamic religions regarding food on/near the weekends, it simply looks like they were trying to accomodate each other's feast/holy days. Uncharacteristically generous.
Also, I think the elevator thing (there's "Sabbath elevators" here, as well) was for not being allowed to operate heavy machinery on the Sabbath, not anything to do with fire.-- FlyingToaster, May 08 2020 // gramarly isn't working on my site so probably tons of stelling mistales. Sorry. //
Never apologize, never explain.
Particularly, never apologize - it's a sign of weakness.-- 8th of 7, May 08 2020 // was to the effect of not being allowed to operate heavy machinery on the Sabbath //
Silly. If the rabbi's foot got caught in the elevator door would he wait until Monday to wrench it free? Or holler at the Shabbos goy to do it? Could the Shabbos goy hold out for a better price? Silly rabbit.-- whatrock, May 08 2020 I've been unable to find a maker of tuna in America that doesn't grind up their tuna to mix it with the liquid so they can pretend the liquid is tuna. Even "solid" tuna often has this problem. It makes it particularly hard to drain.-- Voice, May 08 2020 //kosher// In my very limited experience Jews go far beyond the religious laws. For example I asked a rabbi at my local temple whether tacos and burritos are acceptable for passover and he said no, even though they are very clearly unleavened bread. It wasn't about following the law, it was about being extra Jewish.-- Voice, May 08 2020 Not necessarily. They would need to be kosher. Perhaps tacos and burritos contain milk ? If so, wouldn't that contravene the strictures of "no milk and meat" in Leviticus ?
Unless it was a vegetarian filling.-- 8th of 7, May 08 2020 //very clearly unleavened bread//
Unleavened, as in the bread exists in a non-leavened state. In a pinch, could you perhaps take normal bread and perform some emergency deleavening with a hammer?-- bs0u0155, May 08 2020 It is forbidden to boil a calf in his mother's milk, but there's no law about consuming milk and meat together in the old texts as far as I know. Jews don't eat milk and meat together though, which is ironic considering all the other lawyering they do with other laws. Anyway it needn't include cheese and the recipe for tortillas does not include milk. Edit: I see [Max] posted something similar already.-- Voice, May 08 2020 Probably because of brain evolution, absolutes were needed when there was not much empathy and thought. But as those human facets have grown, more valid grey areas can be opened up, discussed and taken advantage of.
Vacuum packages?-- wjt, May 10 2020 // Probably because of brain evolution, absolutes were needed when there was not much empathy and thought. //
Human brains have not changed significantly in the last 25,000 years. That's because as a species you haven't changed very much at all in that time.
Paleolithic humans are indistinguishable from contemporary ones. This can easily be demonstrated by reference to broadcast media; those in positions of responsibility have no better approach to problems than grunting, howling, and heaving rocks at one another.-- 8th of 7, May 10 2020 random, halfbakery