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Discovered last night, watching "Food Tech" on TV (because I do not care about football - although I am happy for N'awlins), that beef & broccoli in most (American) Chinese restaurants is made with oyster sauce (which is what gives it that rich flavor and moist texture). Furthermore, oyster sauce, unlike duck sauce or lobster sauce, is actually made from the animal for which it is named (rather than having been designed to be served with it). In this case, the boiled down concentrate from thousands of oysters.
The show followed the process from fertilizing eggs in small vats to letting them develop in room-sized vats (each of which produces about a bucketfull of microscopic baby oysters) to the next vats where they begin to grow on old oyster shells to the ocean bay where they're cultivated into full-size oysters to the factory where a hundred or so professionals shuck (by hand) several million per day to the other factory where those millions are boiled down into barrels of concentrate. A bottle smaller than a baseball holds the concentrate from several thousand oysters. That concentrate is mixed with sweetener and coloring and such to make oyster sauce.
Oysters, as you may know, are not what one would call "kosher." Technically, the beef isn't kosher, either. In order to actually be kosher, the cow has to be killed by a trained professional using a very specific method (designed to make the death as quick and painless as possible). There are also blessings involved, of course. Then the meat must be thoroughly cleaned of all blood and so on. But at least the cow is a kosher animal. And modern techniques may well be quicker than the several thousand year old technique. But the oysters are explicitly forbidden.
I try not to eat shellfish. I make an exception for the rare bowl of clam chowder, but that's about it. (I can't really explain it. Nor can I explain why I generally won't mix meat and milk and won't eat pork but will happily consume pepperoni pizza. But it works for me. It's more about a nod to tradition than any religious significance.) Dad is much more strict about it. He'll eat non-koshered meat, but will not touch anything with non-kosher animals.
So now I'm not sure what to do about what seemed like an innocuous enough dish. Or how many other dishes might be made with the same sauce. I don't know how to break it to Dad.
The show followed the process from fertilizing eggs in small vats to letting them develop in room-sized vats (each of which produces about a bucketfull of microscopic baby oysters) to the next vats where they begin to grow on old oyster shells to the ocean bay where they're cultivated into full-size oysters to the factory where a hundred or so professionals shuck (by hand) several million per day to the other factory where those millions are boiled down into barrels of concentrate. A bottle smaller than a baseball holds the concentrate from several thousand oysters. That concentrate is mixed with sweetener and coloring and such to make oyster sauce.
Oysters, as you may know, are not what one would call "kosher." Technically, the beef isn't kosher, either. In order to actually be kosher, the cow has to be killed by a trained professional using a very specific method (designed to make the death as quick and painless as possible). There are also blessings involved, of course. Then the meat must be thoroughly cleaned of all blood and so on. But at least the cow is a kosher animal. And modern techniques may well be quicker than the several thousand year old technique. But the oysters are explicitly forbidden.
I try not to eat shellfish. I make an exception for the rare bowl of clam chowder, but that's about it. (I can't really explain it. Nor can I explain why I generally won't mix meat and milk and won't eat pork but will happily consume pepperoni pizza. But it works for me. It's more about a nod to tradition than any religious significance.) Dad is much more strict about it. He'll eat non-koshered meat, but will not touch anything with non-kosher animals.
So now I'm not sure what to do about what seemed like an innocuous enough dish. Or how many other dishes might be made with the same sauce. I don't know how to break it to Dad.
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Of course, this is the reason why Orthodox Jews won't eat even vegetarian dishes in restaurants that aren't kosher... you never know what they might be throwing in. We only trust food if someone vouches that it meets kashrut standards.