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Rabbi Grossman suggests that “The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures.” Interesting, because just like Jews have claimed that eco-kosher is a central tenet of Judaism, Christians also have made the exact same argument about Christianity. And I bet if you dug deep enough you could find the exact movements in Buddhism and Islam. If the same Christianity that did away with eating laws could now embrace them as part of Jesus’ social gospel then I guess anyone could.

The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures--that is why the disconnect between kashrut and the humane treatment of animals is so discordant to Jewish values.

However, eco-kosher is not only an issue of demanding humane kosher slaughtering, as Rabbi Waxman raises, or even of prohibiting kosher veal where humane treatment is lacking, as was raised by the Conservative Movement this past year. Eco-kosher is really about drawing on our kosher consciousness to limit the negative impact our food and consumer choices have on the earth.

For thousands of years, Judaism has taken seriously the idea of "you are what you eat"-– in other words, that the choices we make about what food to eat (and not to eat) has the capacity to make us holy. This is the origin of ancient Jewish dietary laws, known collectively as kashrut. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi first suggested and Rabbi Arthur Waskow has since popularized an important concern about these laws: If what we eat helps make us holy, shouldn’t ethical considerations have a role in deciding what is kosher (literally: fit) to eat? Is an egg from a chicken living its entire life in a 61-square-inch cage as good for our souls (to say nothing of our bodies) as an egg from a cage-free animal? Is meat processed in a plant where workers are underpaid and work in unsafe conditions equivalent to meat where animals are treated humanely and workers are treated fairly? And can pâté de fois gras, made by force-feeding a goose through a tube shoved down its throat, possibly be kosher?

In response, Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi coined the term "eco-kashrut" – meaning eating in a way that is mindful of both ecological concerns and ritual concerns (or more properly: of the way that ecological concerns affect ritual concerns. Rabbi Waskow suggests that the category of eco-kashrut could be expanded beyond food items to other products and services such as paper, energy, etc.).