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Two salads have been prepared and both have raw onions. One salad was prepared with meaty utensils and the other prepared with dairy utensils. The onions were chopped with their respective knives. All the other ingredients are parve.
The utensils, knives and anything else used in the preparation were all completely clean. Let's assume that they were not used in the last 24 hours for dairy/ meat and therefore not ben yomo.
Can the two salads be eaten together?
Cutting an onion with a cold clean knife "upgrades" it halachically to the equivalent of a hot ben yomo knife (this is the din of duchka d’sakinah applied to davar charif). As such your onions become halavi and basari respectively and as such they cannot be eaten together.
The safer and halachically correct approach is to eat one salad after the other (as the onions don't transfer taste further without knife cutting, see here under IV) but note some poskim do not permit eating the "halavi" onion salad after eating actual meat without first waiting six hours (or whatever duration you wait).
For detailed sources and explanations see here, here and there. I checked all the above with R Yonathan Jessurun who concurs but of course, consult your rabbi before implementing anything you learn here.
