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A recent OU kashrut alert that I found on Kashrut.com says:

Kirkland Nature's Three Berries: Rader Farms, Inc.: This product bears a Half-Moon K symbol and should be used only for cooking and pureeing.

Why would cooking or pureeing be OK but other uses (presumably raw snacking) be not OK?

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  • Now a major motion picture: youtube.com/watch?v=2AAOoGWZZ7A
    – Isaac Moses ♦
    Mar 4, 2010 at 6:48
  • it's shaatnez!!
    – Joel Spolsky
    Jun 17, 2011 at 3:33
  • @Joel, Well, according to R' Hirsch, shaatnez represents the separation of the animal part of ourselves, "vital forces of cognition, will and striving," from the vegetable part, "nourishment, procreation, and all the stimuli, drives and actions associated with these," such that neither is subservient to the other. Of course, that doesn't normally stop us from mixing meat and vegetables in a culinary, rather than sartorial context. Actually, here, Shalom points out that more mixing, such that the animal is fully subsumed within the vegetable, is better.
    – Isaac Moses ♦
    Jun 17, 2011 at 14:34

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My guess is that it's a bug issue. Yuck.

If one bug was pureed (or cooked, assuming cooking breaks apart the bug) with several cups of berries, the ground-up bug is nullified ("batel") 1:60 by volume and you can eat the puree. This minute quantity of non-kosher ingredient, which isn't a flavoring, coloring, stabilizer, or enzyme, is not a problem.

However, as long as the bug remains whole, there's the rule that complete organisms ("berya") don't get nullified in large mixtures. There's a chance if you snacked raw that you'd consume a whole bug, hence a problem.

While we're on yuck factors -- there are notes online from Rabbi Tendler's lecture that the carp and whitefish back in Eastern Europe often contained parasitic worms. If you wanted to eat whitefish filet, you had to break apart the flesh to find the worms (which is what Rabbi Moshe Feinstein did). Conveniently, if you grind everything up and make gefilte fish, no more whole organisms, no problem.

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  • 4
    Awesome! So, it turns out that what the fish is actually "gefilte" with is ground worms. Thanks for the heads-up.
    – Isaac Moses ♦
    Jan 7, 2010 at 16:34
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    Also, I'm glad they're making sure we don't have any berya in our berries.
    – Isaac Moses ♦
    Jan 8, 2010 at 1:09
  • Once again, there's a DovBear post we could be informative to if we were public: dovbear.blogspot.com/2010/03/…
    – Isaac Moses ♦
    Mar 4, 2010 at 0:52
  • What's the hetter to puree lichatchila? Or cook for the express purpose of being miraseik?
    – user6591
    Mar 10, 2015 at 14:55
  • @user6591 judaism.stackexchange.com/q/35147/759
    – Double AA ♦
    May 30, 2016 at 4:06

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