If you just nuke the thing for a few minutes there’s no opportunity to drive off moisture, which leads to watery bland sweet potato. The same problem most mashed sweet potatoes have because you’re boiling. There’s also a weird thing with sweet potatoes where the longer you hold them at (or was it below?) a certain temp (I think it was 175F) the more starch in the potato is converted to sugar so it actually tastes better over all. Specifics don’t matter because practically its just cooking at below 400F in the oven till soft and shriveled. 10 minutes in the nuker and you’ll often be stuck with bland, watery, and starchy/stiff spuds. So I’d rather not. Besides my approach takes longer over all but its like an added 5 minutes of active work. Its still stupid easy and way better tasting so why wouldn’t I?
Note I was specifically discussing the reasons for kosher, not the inherent ethical problems with mass production - it’s a religious-moral question, not a mass production morality question. And if you read the linked article I was talking about, he specifically talks about the labor practices involved, and how the mass production of food is often rife with exploitative labor practices. But you’re right about the impact on animals. But the mass production of meats is by no means humane by any stretch of the imagination, at least not here in the US. As you say, the FDA is shit and full of corruption.
And I do eat free range or organic meats, actually.
That’s why the pricks are so important!
My leftover pasta is sad, looking at that amazing sandwich. Jealous and pouting. Me too, a little, looking at the leftover pasta.
The Babirusa is a pig, however distantly related to domestic pigs. Peccaries, on the other hand are not pigs, and while related and visually similar, have a number of significant morphological differences (along with being genetically distinct).
Or some combination of the two.
The best thing I ever heard on why shellfish is not kosher was something along the lines of “Ok, these were largely a desert dwelling herding people. If you somehow found shellfish in the desert, would you think it’d be safe to eat?”.
You prick it either way. The microwave just spikes the heat up till done as fast as can be. No time for all that useless to leak out. Sustained, dry heat is magic. And it don’t live in the nuker.
Have you ever had wild boar bacon? It’s fantastic.
I’ve had wild boar sausages (also reindeer salami), which were yummy, never had the bacon though.
Think thick-cut bacon, but with almost no fat. Sounds lousy, right? Yet somehow the little slivers are rich enough to have as much flavor as a full strip of regular bacon.
damn you for posting a photo of that sandwich…drool…buys plane ticket… 
Between sandwiches like this and the things like that kielbasa horse-collar, my body-weight is very glad I don’t live in the US.
My stomach and tastebuds though… when they stop weeping, I’ll ask them. 
For the love of sammies…now i have to fly to both coasts!! damn that looks tasty.
I’ve heard peccaries taste pretty much like pork though. And while the particulars of Kosher law might have gotten extracted enough for certain Jewish bodies to pick either the peccaries or babirusa out as being some how OK, I dunno if either really qualifies. Not a Rabbi and not a Jew. But I’m reasonably sure that the reason pigs aren’t Kosher as described in the bible is that they have a split “hoof” (apparently it doesn’t have to be a true hoof either, just any reasonably similar 2 toe structure) but doesn’t chew cud. Anything that has one but not the other gets to be traif, pig or no. Pigs are just the example used. So the peccaries are closely related enough to pigs that they should (and if I recall are) split foot but not cud chewing. And thus non-kosher or traif.
At the risk of going completely off topic here, it is not correct to confuse the laws of kashrut with a “religious-moral” question and also not correct to confuse the laws regarding treatment of animals or treatment of workers here. These are all separate issues and more formally religious-legal rather than religious-moral.
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Battery farming of chickens in an of itself is not a consideration for determining the kosher status of a bird before or after after it is correctly schected. If the chickens are raised in such a way that they are damaged or deformed in certain ways by the battery process, they may be treifah and thus may not be schechted anyway.
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The Torah does also contain labor practice laws. Violation of or compliance with these laws is a separate matter subject to multiple branching but again has nothing to do with the kosher status of an animal. It is of course possible that an employer is compliant with the labor practice laws of the Torah yet encourages mistreatment of animals in a way that results in them becoming treifah but that ends up again not coming under the laws of kashrut.
Note also that the blog post regarding the babirusa was written by a Reform rabbi. Not to insult my co-religionists but Reform Judaism knows as much about kashrut as I know about astrophysics. Just because I have seen a few episodes of Cosmos doesn’t qualify me to speak authoritatively on the subject. As a side note this rabbi misquotes or misinterprets the dispute between Maimonides Abravanel. What bothers me more is the tactic of verse linking in Deuteronomy between the sections describing what animals can be eaten and the line of “You shall be holy for I the Lord am holy.” The problem here verges on willful deception in that the word “holy” in Hebrew is kadosh meaning separate. All respected commentators on these verses point out how the dietary laws indeed separate the Jews from other populations. Only when one gets into chassidic/kabbalistic theory does the concept best translated as holiness come into eating but the reasons are metaphysical not legal.
Additionally the reference at the end of the blog post is to a concept that is entirely unaccepted in the Orthodox world and based on things which have nothing to do with kashrut itself. To call it the “apex of kashrut” is a willful misunderstanding or a lie.
Personally I have no gripe against anyone who chooses non factory farmed meats, but I do have a gripe about people who try and extend the concepts of kashrut in that direction.
Baked sweet potatoes with lime juice on them taste like christmas pudding.
I’m not sure being able to see the sandwich but not eat the sandwich counts as better off.
(I want the sandwich)
Thanks for the more orthodox view on these issues. Overall, I’m finding this discussion really fascinating as an outsider from the religion.
