Ash Wednesday ushers the start of Lent, a six-week period where Christians prepare for Easter through prayer and reflection. For Catholics, the season also involves fasting on certain days and abstaining from meat on Fridays. The tradition, which started in the early church, is something that Catholics, and many Christians in general, have prescribed to for centuries.

Catholics avoid meat during Lent to show respect for the death of Jesus. There have been exceptions in the past, like dispensations when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday during the Lenten season.

Fish, on the other hand, is permitted. It’s the reason why fast food chains like McDonald’s have for decades aggressively advertised the Filet-O-Fish, a sandwich invented in 1962 to cater to Catholics looking to avoid meat on Fridays and to make up for sagging burger sales. (Now Arby’s has jumped into this market.)

Thanks to products like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, the dietary restrictions that come with Lent have been turned on their head. Plant-based imitation meat alternatives look and taste like meat — but isn’t. That has unleashed a meaty debate in pews and on message boards over whether plant-based patties can or cannot be eaten during Lent and whether doing so is a sin.

“As someone who eats and craves meat, I see not eating meat as a sacrifice,” wrote one Reddit user. “Though it may be OK to eat, it is a small sacrifice compared to Jesus dying for our sins. I will try the burger, but not on a Friday or Ash Wednesday in Lent.”

Others disagree, saying if it isn’t meat then it’s fair game.

“I would think that it is against the spirit of the requirement, but it wouldn’t be a sin because it is not a violation of the church law,” wrote another user.

The debate isn’t limited to Roman Catholics. Orthodox Christians who belong to Eastern Rite churches also fast and abstain from meat (and dairy) throughout Great Lent and at other times of the year. Jews who keep kosher have also had to face the religious predicaments that these foods now present.

Back in my Rocky Mountain days, in the 1980s, I heard an Orthodox rabbi give a fascinating talk with a title that went something like this: “The quest for the kosher cheeseburger.”

His thesis: If the result of this quest is a cheeseburger — mixing meat with a milk product — then it’s not kosher. If you end up with something that is kosher, then it isn’t a real cheeseburger. So what’s the point?

The Orthodox rabbi was using the “kosher cheeseburger” as a symbol of the efforts that many Jews make to blur the line between assimilating into what can, at times, be a hostile culture and following the traditions of their ancient faith. Can modern Jewish believers create a golden cheeseburger and eat it, too?

This is an essentially spiritual question, but it’s a question that takes on a whole new meaning with the explosion of attention now being given to plant-based meat substitutes (note the blitz of ads for Burger King’s new Impossible Whooper).

The Washington Post business team recently covered this trend and did a fine job of digging into these religious questions, starting with the headline: “Shalt thou eat an Impossible Burger? Religious doctrine scrambles to catch up to new food technology.” It’s rare to see scripture in a business lede, but this one was right on point — focusing on on a symbolic food that is totally out of bounds in Jewish tradition.

You think a kosher cheeseburger is a wild idea? How about kosher shrimp?

Leviticus 11 contains a zoo’s worth of animals. The hyrax and the monitor lizard. The katydid is there, as is the gecko. And it ends: “You must distinguish between the unclean and the clean, between living creatures that may be eaten and those that may not be eaten.”
Dietary restrictions are woven into religious texts, the Old Testament and the New, the Koran, the Vedas and the Upanishads. Some are mercifully practical, as in the law of necessity in Islamic jurisprudence: “That which is necessary makes the forbidden permissible.”

Now, Tyson executives are seeking certification from various agencies declaring their plant-based shrimp both kosher and halal. The team at the Post business desk identified the religion ghost in that equation and produced this solid thesis statement:

Making the impossible possible: Can Catholics now eat plant-based 'meat' during Lent?

Kosher sort-of shrimp and cheeseburgers: Do plant-based foods violate spirit of biblical law?