Many in recent months have come out against eating strawberries - at least unless they are mashed - due to a serious infestation this season.
Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, he of the ortho bling bling, has come out in favor of the strawberry in a recent visit to the Shomron, where he gave a shiur on the topic in the yeshivat hesder of Karnei Shomron.
INN reports that Rabbi Amar said the prohibition never included eating bugs that can only be seen by microscope, and therefore strawberries are fine and can be eaten after soaking them in water and cutting off the tops.
Whew. This came just in time for some strawberry cheesecake on Shavuos!
Well that makes a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteI love strawberries.... and the cheesecake is the nearest thing to eating in Heaven's diner... if it had one!
ReplyDeleteWe really need a showdown with poskim on this.
ReplyDeleteI refused to buy any sefer using photomicrographs, shouting "see, see, there they are!".
Ludicrous.
Toda - again - Rav Amar, for standing up for normalcy.
What is a bling bling.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that EVERYONE agrees that if you can only see the bugs with a microscope its not a problem.
ReplyDeleteSo why do many posking sat that there is a bug problem in the strawberries?
The reason is that you CAN see them with the bare eye. You might not be able to see them if you dont know what you are looking for, or you might see them and think its just dirt - but you SAW them !
I dont get his view. If you look at the pictures of the strawberries, you see that they are small enough that you wouldnt know what to look for even, and you wouldnt recognize a bug - well - if you ate it.
What does that have to do with a microscope? What does this have to do with his heter?
anon - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bling-bling
ReplyDeletethe term here refers to what Rav Amar is wearing in the picture in the post I linked to. The term was used in the comments there
I dont buy those books either. I think those books are meant to scare out of you the thought of ever eating food again. I find those books disgusting, and prefer not to know.
ReplyDeleteFound your site on a Google search for something else and have been going through your posts.
ReplyDeleteI happened to be at the shiur the Rav gave, and he said that even if you can see the bug, it might not pose a problem if it just looks like a speck -- could be a speck of dirt for all you know. Just seeing it, but not seeing limbs or a head or anything that shows that it's a bug does not make that speck assur.
(Caution: I did not understand every word the Rav used in his whole shiur, but I did understand almost all of it, and this particular part was easy to understand.)
thanks anonymous
ReplyDelete