Word Prompt – MILCHIG – Bari Mitzmann

What a prompt. My gut reaction is every Ashkenazi Jew’s gastrointestinal nightmare.

Milchig, what makes something dairy, has been sitting in the back of my mind since a summer I spent learning at Nishmat in 2023. We were deep in a halachic discussion about lab-grown milk. Is it dairy? Will kosher certifications certify it pareve? And if it’s deemed pareve, what do we do with the fact that it walks, talks, and pours exactly like the real thing?

Now that it’s edging into the consumer market as a pareve product, something clicked for me. What makes something milchig isn’t just how it looks or how it behaves. It’s where it came from. Its origin story.

So much of what we accept as true about ourselves, about others, about the world, is based on appearance. It looks like what we know, so we assume it is what we know. But when you actually trace something back to its source, really ask where it came from, how it was made, what shaped it, you sometimes find something entirely different than what the label suggested.

It may look milchig. But knowing the source changes the story.