Note the odd, descriptive phrasing "are therefore not used," rather than the proscriptive "should" or "may therefore not be used."
That's an interesting point. Sounds a bit like the tail is wagging the dog.
Why the flurry of negative posts? Do we have a failed messiahsipi in the making? :-)
Interestingly, one of the OU's leading kashrut people says that oats aren't one of the five grains either...
The OU isn't the only one who publicly changed their position on this, they just happened to have left the contradictions up at the same time. A few years ago, Aish Hatorah had an article up about "quinoa - the miracle non-kitniyot food." Then, the advice silently changed to 'it's a disagreement, ask your rabbi.'
That's different. The OU is in the business of paskening about food, not Aish. I guess you could say that they finally did give an opinion, rather than passing it off to the rabbi.
(Just saw your post. I was tipped off by someone else, perhaps who saw your post.)
I've no faith in the OU. (A position held for a long time.) Their official position is to use almost every da'as yachid and chumrah, so as to make their hechsher as widely used as possible. Perfectly kosher foods go hechsher-less as a result. (Chalav yisrael excepted.) And worse, as we've had the misfortune of seeing recently, at least some of their hechsherim are based on politics, not the actual food.
As a teenager you heard it said this hechser is no good, that one is no good. Never any reasons, just "that's what they say." As you get older you see that almost every single hechser has perfectly good legs to stand on. Every one has a rabbi behind it who knows what's he's talking about. Even the old pre-Elyon, K-for-P marshmallows had solid mattirim for gelitin! To connect the threads, rabbbi Berel Wein said in the name of his predecessor at the OU [But I dont think he was speaking of R. Rosenberg] that its very, very hard for food to be actually treif. And he was talking about meat products, mind you.
On the other hand, amaranth is also known as pigweed and is therefore clearly asur
Their official position is to use almost every da'as yachid and chumrah
Yet, strangely, as I blogged here, they seem to be pretty lenient this year with kashering dishwashers!
This makes no sense to me. Why add something to kitniyot? It is a minhag in the first place and no one in the past has every even considered it kitniyot? Whatever.
For years I've been waiting for someone to come out with a psak that potatoes are kitniyos.
Dan,
That'd be the Chayei Adam.
Sure enough: "Although today potatoes are on most people's Pesach diet, since they are used to make flour there is reason to argue that the gezeira of kitniyos should apply to them. Based on this, some poskim wanted to forbid eating potatoes on Pesach (Nishmas Odom 20). However this minhag was never accepted by most of Klal Yisroel, because they are not seeds, they are not small, and they were not forbidden in the times of the Rishonim" (http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/archives5763/
metzora/otravis.htm). Not to mention that it would be extremely hard to do without them.
Let me amend my comment to say, "It's only a matter of time before the rejected minority opinion dumping potatoes into kitniyos becomes an ancient Minhog Yisroel that dare not be questioned."
The title of the post should be
Safer Minhag Ta'ut leChumra
I always understood that kitniyot were connected to issues of a specific time (the 16th-17th c.) and place (eastern Europe) surrounding the confusion of "legume flour" with wheat flour and possible preparation of invalid matzah.
Now all kinds of foods not widely available in 16th-c. Europe (corn, peanuts, quinoa) are considered kitniyot, as are oils derived from them.
If quinoa is considered kitniyot because of what it looks like, then potatoes -- which are actually made into flour -- are definitely in the kitniyot category.
star-k allows quinoa.
R. Moshe Feinstein allowed peanuts (except in localities where there was a specific and definite custom to avoid them).
This just in:
"According to a survey just out from potato retailer, Israelis buy 16,000 tons of potatoes in the fortnight before Pesach, representing a 55% rise compared to a two-week period during the rest of the year."
(Forward, 3/26/09)
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