[giraffe_lady]

IIRC the meat and dairy mixing is based on a specific passage of exodus or deuteronomy forbidding boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk, which was a ritual practice of the canaanites at one time and so it may have always been an ethnic-religious differentiation thing.

In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.

[fads_go]

Again, it pays to notice specific details.

A previous poster mentioned boiling in milk as mixing death (boiling/eating) with life (milk), as a sort of generic badness.

As giraffe_lady just reminded us, the original prescription is boiling the baby in it's OWN MOTHER's milk. This is not a "put cheese on hamburger" situation, it is an explicit expression of cruelty to the mother and to her baby.

And the prohibition was put in place because boiling babies in their mother's milk was considered a delicacy back then. People used to do horrific shit, celebrating cruelty.

[kelipso]

I don’t see how you can attribute cruelty to it. It won’t be any more or less cruel to boil the calf in a vegetable stock.

Besides, it clearly seems to have been a “don’t copy the ritual process of this other tribe” rule.

[genewitch]

Was it before or after the American cheeseburger? Because that's the main example we use as to what that restricts. I don't, for instance, know if that applies to chicken fried chicken.

[giraffe_lady]

Exodus predates the cheeseburger by a good few years I'm pretty sure yeah.

[genewitch]

> How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.

[krab]

The rabbis wanted to be on the safe side, I guess.

[giraffe_lady]

Oh I see, sorry. Yeah the generalized prohibition is older than cheeseburgers but I'm not sure by how much. I believe I have read about rabbis discussing it in the middle ages but I may have misunderstood. I don't know that much about rabbinical judaism frankly.

[Philadelphia]

It’s at least 1400 years older than cheeseburgers