Is cultured meat Kosher?

Question

This question claims that meat cultured from a kosher source is kosher too. However, a quick reading of sources seems to indicate the contrary:

Tur (YD 62:1):

וכן בשר הפורש מן החי אסור אע"פ שאין בו משום אבר מן החי אסור משום ובשר בשדה טריפה לא תאכלו

Shulchan Aruch (YD 62:2):

וּבָשָׂר הַפּוֹרֵשׁ מִן הַחַי אָסוּר, מִשּׁוּם וּבָשָׂר בַּשָּׂדֶה טְרֵפָה (שְׁמוֹת כב, ל)

And flesh that separates from a live animal is forbidden because of "And the flesh in the field Treifah."

Are there any sources that say that cultured meat would be kosher? What is their reasoning?

Answer 1

In a recent article in Hakirah, R Moshe David Tendler (the son-in-law of R Moshe Feinstein, a Rosh Yeshiva in YU but also a professor of Jewish Medical Ethics and of Biology at YU), John D Loike and Ira Bedzow write (pp. 196ff) that cloned meat would be universally accepted as kosher if:

1. The sample was obtained from a kosher animal.
2. The animal was properly slaughtered.

Those companies who procure tissue to create cloned meat through removing muscle tissue from a living cow’s neck muscle make it prohibited both for Jews, according to Halakhah (SA YD 62:2 that you cite), and for non-Jews, according to the Noahide laws (ever min ha'hai). However once the animal is ritually slaughtered, a subsequently extracted sample would be permissible to grow in culture to produce meat.

If one needs "living meat" to start the culture, they show how the Rambam would allow ritually slaughtering the animal then using some of its meat before it dies (MT Shekhita 1:2 at the end).

They further explain why the lack of salting as well as the fact that the growth medium is not kosher are actually not prohibitions in the specific case of cultured meat.

They note the intention of some producers of cultured meat (e.g., SuperMeat) is to produce kosher meat.

Answer 2

The discussion of this kind of meat requires that the original source cells be taken from an animal that had been slaughtered properly so that the meat was kosher to begin with. Thus, it would not be eiver min hachai.

Orthodox groups debate kashrut of lab-grown meat

Several key conditions would have to be met to create kosher, parve cultured beef.

The tissue samples would have to come from an animal that had been slaughtered according to kosher rules, not from a biopsy from a live animal, Genack said.

The principle underlying this theory is much like the status of gelatin in Jewish law: Though it is derived from an animal, it is not meat (the OU certifies some bovine-derived gelatin as parve).

Genack noted another source for viewing cultured meat as parve: a 19th-century Vilna-born scholar known as the Heshek Shlomo wrote that the meat of an animal conjured up in a magical incantation could be considered parve. It may not be too much of a stretch, then, to apply the same logic to modern genetic wizardry.

The Chabad movement, however, believes that any such cultured meat would be considered as meat and would lack any such parve status.

Writing on Chabad.org, Yehuda Shurpin also discussed magical meat, citing a Talmudic discussion of meat conjured by magic or delivered from heaven, but said that neither could serve as a precedent for lab-grown meat.

If the cells extracted from the animal in order to grow the meat “are considered substantial enough to be called meat, this may present a problem,” Shurpin stated.

Such meat, he theorized, could violate the biblical prohibition of eating meat severed from a living animal.

“For Jews, if the cells are considered real meat, then presumably they would need to be extracted from a kosher animal that was slaughtered according to Jewish law,” he wrote.

However, “these are just preliminary thoughts on the subject,” he was careful to note.