What’s Pareve Food?

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Pareve is a Hebrew word for a food product that contains neither meat nor milk ingredients. This is important in the practice of kosher, where milk and meat cannot be mixed during a meal. A food marked Pareve is therefore free from many dietary concerns, as it can be combined with most other things safely.

Modern Jewish law actually has an interesting definition of meat, where fish are not considered meat. Consequently, it can be said that fish are Pareve foods and therefore not subject to the same restrictions as chickens or other meats.

Eggs are something of a mixed area when it comes to their Pareve status. Eggs that come from kosher birds, meaning most non-carrion or non-carnivorous birds, are considered Pareve food. This assumes they do not contain blood, as blood is strictly prohibited under kosher law. Ashkenazi Jews also consider eggs that come from culled birds to have the same status as meat and therefore not to be Pareve food.

Some additives in foods add an extra layer of confusion when it comes to their food pareve status. Calcium lactate, for example, can be derived from milk or non-milk sources. In one case that might be considered Pareve food, while in another it certainly wouldn’t.

Another problem stems from FDA regulations with ingredient listings. If a small enough percentage of a product consists of a particular ingredient, that ingredient may be omitted from the ingredients list. This means that a product that might look like Pareve food, having no meat or dairy listings, might actually contain small amounts of dairy or meat. Not enough to be required by law to list them, but certainly enough to make them non-pareve by Rabbinical Law.

Yet another problem arises due to shared equipment. The products may be produced on equipment that also processes dairy products and are therefore not strictly Pareve food. These products may not list dairy in their ingredients, but trace amounts could leach into the food. More manufacturers are listing if their foods are processed on shared equipment, however, making it easier to control for cross-contamination that could make a food not pareve.

However, most rabbis these days advise erring on the side of caution when trying to decide if a manufactured food is Pareve and actually look for the maker’s brand name Pareve, known as their hechshar.

Even a kosher and Pareve marking, however, can be questionable. There have been growing complaints in recent years about manufacturers falsely posing as manufacturers of Pareve foods when they are not. A number of foods, particularly from China, have been found to display pareve and kosher marks, but actually contain dairy or meat ingredients. There are also growing complaints from certification bodies that they are not particularly stringent in their testing and therefore allow non-Pareve products to be labeled as Pareve food.

In the end, it’s best to check out a hechshar from a reputable and consistent certification body when looking for a Pareve food. It is also recommended to make sure that the manufacturer is from a country where fraud is relatively low, such as most European nations, Israel and the United States.

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