Kashrut or kashrus is a set of dietary laws. These laws are about which foods Jewish people should or should not eat. Some laws are also about how to prepare or eat certain foods.
Food that may be eaten is called kosher (“fit”, “proper” or “appropriate”). Food that may not be eaten is called treif or treyf.
The basic principles of kashrut come from the Torah‘s books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
People who follow the laws of kashrut are described as ‘keeping kosher’. Different denominations interpret the laws of kashrut in different ways. Many individuals also interpret the laws in different ways. People keep kosher – or not – in many different ways that are meaningful to them.
In some places, many food products are marked with symbols to show that they have been certified kosher by different rabbinic institutions. In this photo, a hot dog seller in New York, USA, has a cardboard sign indicating that the hot dogs are kosher.
Text adapted from English Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0.
Kosher Hotdog Stand, photo by Karen Blumberg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
