Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

‘Clean Meat’ Could Be The Answer To Kosher Bacon

Imagine a world with kosher bacon. It may be here sooner than you think.

Rabbi Gavriel Price has the difficult task of determining how the Orthodox Union should approve “clean meat,” which is meat grown in laboratories from animal cells, the New York Times reported.

The Orthodox Union is one of the leading certifiers of kosher food. Clean meat is not yet in stores, but it could be by next year — and the start-ups leading the venture think it deserves a kosher stamp of approval.

The meat is grown in the lab from cells, incubated with heat and fed with nutrients, according to Wired. Several synthetic meat start-ups are based in Israel, the Times reported.

Price recently toured several facilities to learn more about the process. Certifying “clean meat” as kosher would be one thing — but categorizing it as different than traditional meat would allow observant Jews to eat it with dairy products, which is otherwise restricted by kosher law.

“I’d like to spend more time, because I think it’s an important process to understand in a deep way, and there’s no precedent for it really,” Rabbi Price told the Times as he was leaving a tour.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.