Are sloths kosher? A rabbi weighs in

I had hoped to get this posted yesterday to celebrate the beginning of Passover , but fortunately, this is a multi-day holiday so I'm not too late!

My friend and project backer Daniel Fliegel is a rabbi. When he donated to the campaign, I immediately wondered if sloths would be considered kosher. Obviously, the 12 tribes would not have known about sloths directly since sloths only live in the Americas, but they laid down enough rules about how to categorize animals that I thought we might be able to come up with an answer. I asked Daniel to provide a basic rundown of the concept of "kosher"-ness so we could all learn a bit more about the culture before diving into my silly nonsense. All emphasis are mine.

 

"The basics: Kashrut (the noun form of Kosher) is only about eating. In the vernacular we talk about things being 'Kosher' if they are acceptable, but the real meaning is only focused on eating (and then mostly focused on eating animals). The major rules are about mixing milk and meat and what animals are considered Kosher.

Milk and meat comes from the biblical line "don't cook a kid in its mother's "milk" (there is some discussion about if it's milk or fat, but most translate it as milk). This rule gets generalized to mean no dairy with any kind of meat. While most people who keep Kosher don't mix fowl and dairy there are some discussions about where it's allowed, but generally isn't. Which also extends to people having separate dishes for milk meals and meat meals (the Yiddish words are: "milkhic" and "fleshic"). The extent people go to to separate the two vary from community to community. Some even go as far as having 4 separate dishes-- General fleshic and milkhic; and Passover fleshic and Passover Milkhic. The need for separation means there are 3 classes of food-- Fleshic, milkhic, and parve. Parve means that it's not one of the others and can be eaten with either milk or meat. I believe fish is considered parve as are eggs.

The rules around which animal are considered kosher have some general guidelines. A land animal must have split hooves/feet and chew their cud. Pork, for example, has split feet but don't chew their cud which makes them unkosher. Animals that crawl on the ground are all unkosher and the fowl that are permitted are listed. Fish must have scales and fins. There are some insects that are permitted, but I'm not 100% sure of the rules on those. If an animal is kosher (follows the above rules) then in order for the meat to be kosher it must be slaughtered in a particular manner which is supposedly the least painful for the animal. It also is important that there is no blood left.

Those are the large rules that get more and more complicated depending on how far people want to be from crossing them. There are also some minor rules that I think are ridiculous (e.g. Kosher wine can't be touched by non-Jews in the process of being made -- This stems from the middle ages when there was a distrust that the non-Jew wouldn't poison the wine). There is also a newer movement in Kashrut that don't follow these rule but reclaim 'Kosher' to look at sustainable eating practices and environmental impact, but these tend to be in the more liberal communities.

This is really just the surface of these rules.

Here's the tl;dr:

Kosher- food that follows the rules Fleshic - Meat Milkhic - Dairy Parve- Not dairy of meat Don't mix dairy and meat, but parve with anything is alright. Certain meats are kosher if they follow the guidelines, but must be slaughtered in the correct way."

So I've bolded the main criteria that might apply to sloths. I think sloths, due to their multiple claws, could be considered to have a 'split' hoof, but having watched sloths eat, they barely chew their food let alone chew anything like cud. And whenever sloths descend from their trees, which is rare, they are forced to crawl since they can't hold themselves upright (they're built to hang, after all). So it sounds like sloths are NOT kosher. I tried to think if the sloths closest relatives, anteaters and armadillos (which people do eat), might pass the test, but anteaters don't even have teeth so chewing cud is really not an option and armadillos do love to burrow, so two more strikes there. And with that, I think the Xenarthrans have struck out.

 

Daniel and I had a lot of fun going back and forth on this, and we hope you've gotten something out of it too. Passover, after all, is a holiday all about food and the people we share it with. Enjoy it, but keep sloth out of the Seder.

And thanks again to Daniel both for backing this project and sharing a bit of his heritage with all of us.