tribdog said:
what does kosher mean? I know a little about it, but not the specifics. Once, when I worked at pillsbury we had a liquid nitrogen flash freezer. you put stuff on a conveyor belt and it came out the other side frozen. I had heard about making ice cream with liquid nitrogen so I asked if I could send some through and they said no because it would ruin their kosherness, even though none of my ice cream would have touched any part of the machine.
The Bible identifies certain animals as taboo for eating by Jews. Most famously, pigs. Animals which can be eaten are Kosher, others are not. Only Jews are subject to this law, non-Jews who eat these animals are not diminished by doing so according to Judaism.
There is no prohibition against eating dairy products, but there is one against eating meat and dairy products at the same time. I doubt there was meat in the freezer at Pillsbury, but if there was, there would be an issue with running ice cream through. My guess is that the people who told you not to do it were not familiar with Kosher laws and were simply being extra careful because they didn't know.
The Bible does not specifically forbid eating meat and dairy together. What it says is that you must not boil a kid in the milk of its mother. By the 2nd century BC, many of the biblical laws were in need of interpretation and the Talmud was written for that purpose. When the rabbis got to the part about the kid, they had no clue what was meant by it. In a manner perhaps similar to what happened at Pillsbury, they decided that if they forbad the mixing of meat and dairy in general, that they would err on the side of safety.
There was a rival religion thriving among the Jewish people called Baalism. It involved two practices that made it an object of detestation to the Jewish religious leaders, temple prostitution, and human sacrifice. Less detestable, but still a problem were the idol worship and rival god. There are many passages in the Bible exhorting Jews to stay away from it with limited success. Modern archeology has apparently unearthed a temple devoted to this religion along with a wall carving depicting a kid being boiled in its mother's milk. So now we know what the Bible passage means, but it is too late. The Talmudic law obtains for observant Jews.
