>At 10:07 AM 12/3/97 -0700, you wrote:
>>I can usually find pareve options there as well.
>
>Amanda,
>
>Would you mind telling me what "pareve" means?
>

Pareve, aka Parve, is the word used to declare a food as being both
dairy-free and meat-free.

Jewish laws of Kashrut, which determine which foods are Kosher and which
are not, also include restrictions on the separation of milk and meat,
taking literally the biblical prohibition against "cooking a kid in its
mother's milk" (it's somethinbg like that). Because of this, people who
keep Kosher need to know what contains milk, meat, or neither. Pareve means
that it contains neither milk nor meat.

While this is a simple way to quickly tell if a food is dairy-free, there
is one thing that you need to know: foods containing casein (sodium
caseinate, etc.) are considered Pareve. That is, casein has been processed
enough to be considered non-dairy by the standards of kashrut, but may not
be processed enough for purposes of avoiding dairy proteins (for those of
us who have allergic reactions to dairy proteins).


I hope this helps

Mark