A few weeks ago the corridors of online communication were buzzing with a video clip of a sit-in protest at a Jewish chicken grinder plant in Israel. At the centre of the room was a macerator, a blender into which one-day-old chicks are fed and cut to ribbons. In this type of bone-crushing machine a chick can escape some of the blades ending up not quite dead and in unimaginable agony. Apparently, the egg industry in Israel can thus cope with the consequences of God's creation undesirable to the economy. All male hatchlings are killed as they cannot lay eggs, and the females kept alive as long as they are useful. The most galling thing about the Israeli video clip was the mezuzah on the door. I find it impossible to believe that our shepherd lawgiver, Moses, who carried tired sheep on his back, would tolerate such cruelty in the backyard of kashrut.
It is arguable that eggs whose supply is only achievable through such heartless cruelty should be considered as non-kosher. A food enterprise which relies on the dismemberment of animals limb by limb - forbidden under Noahide laws - should also fall outside of the pale of kosher, even if the macerator is, ironically, operated by kippah wearers in a room adorned with a mezuzah. Moreover, the Passover which commemorates the cruel killings of males by the Pharaoh, while the fertile females were kept alive for society's convenience, should not be catered for with the use of many dozens of eggs produced with industrial cruelty.
Kashrut is egg-centric; an entire tractate in the Babylonian Talmud, Beitza, is named after the kosher essential. The consumption of healthy eggs is central to halachah. A misshapen egg is treated as non-kosher, suspected as having originated from a carnivorous bird. Blood in eggs from chicks that may have been near a cockerel is considered live blood and must be removed from albumen but cannot be separated out of the yolk. In the latter case, the entire egg is discarded before it can be used.
Yet it is precisely the cockerel which disappears from sight in the egg industry, exterminated even before it reaches a day old. This is particularly contrary to the values which underpin Torah, which insists that animals live at least a week before slaughter. For meat-eaters, it is the cockerel which tastes best, and so it seems incredible that they must all die first. If only children in faith schools adopt one male chick, heartless killing methods could be eliminated overnight. In fact, Jews should take the lead: the first blessing of the day should only be recited in response to hearing the crowing of a cockerel. Without the male bird, we cannot even start our morning prayers.
It is especially ironic, given the genuine concern for shechita, that a well-informed Jewish community can be so passive or even ignorant of this aspect of the food industry. There is no halachic excuse for cruelty to animals, even when the Torah permits their culling or slaughter. The Talmud tells of Rabbi Judah the Prince who became physically afflicted as a punishment for being insensitive to a calf fearful of impending slaughter. The Talmudic passage makes it clear that there is no person too illustrious, nor animal too lowly in intelligence, to escape the tenderness required towards God's creation.
In the United States, as many as 200 million chicks are culled in the egg industry
As a first step towards more ethical egg sourcing, there is a British farm - Hen Nations - which rescues hens from certain death when they near a year old and allows them to roam and feed freely over meadows in their "retirement"; otherwise, those hens would be killed before reaching a year. It is a kiddush Hashem that the Jewish Vegetarian Society, based in Golders Green, is an outlet for these eggs. Director Lara Smallman explained to me it is only Germany which has taken the legal step to bring an end by 2017 to the brutal slaughter of hour-old male chicks through the introduction of egg-sexing. This method allows farmers to determine the sex of the chick while still inside the mother, saving the unnecessary killing of millions of born lives a year.
Rabbinic authorities worldwide should issue a hechsher for eggs where there has been neither bal tashchit, a waste of life and resources, nor tzar baalei chayim, wanton cruelty and pain inflicted on life forms. In the United States alone, where one third of the commercial market is certified kosher, as many as 200 million chicks a year are culled in the egg industry alone.
Neither veganism nor squeamishness motivate my view; I am a meat-eater and can let blood without fainting. I simply do not believe that halachah tolerates maceration. To maintain fully kosher homes, the grinding alive of chickens or their death in gas chambers must not go unaddressed in our communities.
