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I was recently posed the following puzzle:

You have a pot of meat. You put in milk. It becomes pareve. How can this be?

Any ideas on how this is possible?

yydl
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Isaac Moses
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2 Answers2

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From Ohr Sameyach's archive, #156:

Mix 1 fluid ounce of beef gravy with 59 fluid ounces of water. We don't have 1:60 yet, so the pot is "meaty." Then pour in 1 fluid ounce milk. The pot now contains 60:1 against the milk, but also 60:1 against the meat. It's therefore pareve.

Compared to my previous answer:

-- Both answers only work if there are no recognizable pieces of meat.
-- This answer is better in that the milk is "normal" milk.
-- This answer is also better in that the pot is really, really pareve (human milk, while pareve after-the-fact, should not be used to cook with meat, as it looks really weird!)
-- The previous answer is better as the only ingredients are in fact "meat" and "milk"; not "very dilute meaty substance."

msh210
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Shalom
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  • Are you allowed to do this? Or would this count as a problem of אין מבטלין איסור לכתחילה? – Curiouser May 30 '11 at 14:56
  • Yes you'd be allowed to do so; at no point was there a pot of "issur" that you diluted. You took one thing that was 100% kosher (albeit dairy) and added another that was 100% kosher (albeit meat). – Shalom Oct 28 '11 at 00:15
  • You have a meat mixture and you are intentionally adding milk to it. When the first drop of milk hits the meat mixture, you are nullifying it l'chatchila, no? – Curiouser Oct 28 '11 at 02:37
  • Nope. The prohibition is to take something that is right now non-kosher, and add something to it. Pot A is kosher, Pot B is kosher. – Shalom Oct 28 '11 at 12:40
  • @Shalom: that's true for any basar b'chalav case. The point is that you are adding a drop of milk to a meat mixture, which is forbidden. Then you continue to add milk so that the mixture is no longer meat. But I don't understand how you are allowed to add the first drop of milk to a meat mixture? – Curiouser Oct 28 '11 at 19:13
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    If you look at Ohr Sameach's answer, you will see they are talking about how does one "have" such a mixture, not "make" such a mixture. They don't say "mix", rather they say "falls in". So your "recipe" is, I think, ossur. If you disagree, find a source to allow it. – Curiouser Oct 28 '11 at 19:55
  • I don't understand how this works based on this: http://www.etzion.org.il/vbm/archive/yomyom/r/r1.php – b a Jan 17 '13 at 21:00
  • Start with this case: 1 fluid ounce of milk falls into 60 ounces of beef broth. Everything's kosher. Chana"n means "if the mixture is prohibited, we treat its entire volume as prohibited." Same thing here; 1 ounce milk falls into 60 ounces of very, very weak beef broth. You are correct, if you change the order, e.g. mix 1 ounce milk with 1 ounce meat and then 59 ounces water, you'd have 61 ounces of non-kosher. (This actually came up in regards to a product involving clam juice made on the same line as beer; the solution was to change the order in which ingredients were mixed.) – Shalom Jan 18 '13 at 01:40
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If the milk was halachically pareve to begin with (e.g. human milk), and you added 60:1 by volume against the meat, the result would be pareve.

Shalom
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