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Is star trek replicator meat kosher?
I feel like, if someone felt like puzzling it out, the two interesting routes to take would be “did a jew make this food, if they made this machine/loaded this machine/ordered the machine to make food?” (That last one is particularly promising/tangled because of the rules regarding gentiles preparing food with Jewish supervision: does it count as observing because it’s not like you have the ability Stop the machine if it does something wrong.)
The question of “is the requirement for kosher slaughter removed if the meat was never alive?” gets fancy. Maybe if the meat that they scanned to produce the Meat Data from was kosher slaughtered, that would suffice? This is, I feel, an argument going on in the background of every star trek show.
But to know that we kinda have to know where a replicator is getting its data? Is it doing synthesis or reduplication of scanned foods? Does your kosher brisket contain components of a non-kosher cut that contained other qualities you asked for (like marbling or age?)
I think the even deeper question is, knowing how smart starfleet ships are, could one convert to Judaism, and would that solve the replicator problem?
I can only think of one actually sentient Starfleet ship (as opposed to being a space Alexa) in the entirety of Trek canon – the Discovery’s computer is sentient now – and I think that would be the absolute minimum requirement for converting. So possibly that one ship could.
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