food - Is the lemon slice added to a soda in many bars a problem kosher-wise?

Many bars (and hotel lobbies) will add a lemon wedge to the top of a glass of soda; often it's used to differentiate between Diet Coke (gets the lemon) and regular Coke (no lemon).

Does this pose a kashrus problem?

Answer

Ask your rabbi.

And a warning: if you're trying to impress your date by just quoting my answer here, there's a decent chance she's seen it too by now, so nice try. (But then again, if you're both yodeyans, you're off to a good start ...)

Here are the issues, as I understand them and as I've heard:

• Is the knife clean? If not, who knows what was on it.


• Let's assume the knife was clean. The problem is that lemons are sharp-tasting -- "davar charif" -- and thus, if sliced by a non-kosher knife, would become non-kosher. That's the big issue here.
  
  
  
  
  • So if you walk into a non-kosher restaurant, pull out a knife, and slice one lemon, you have a problem. There's a decent chance this knife was used for ham, then this lemon -- not kosher.
  
  
  
  


• The straightest way out of the problem is if the knife was used for high volumes of kosher foods. By the practice of the Shulchan Aruch (though again today we buy with a hechsher whenever possible), you could buy commercial sliced lemons, ginger, or onions; as they're producing such large volumes that even if the knife had been used to slice ham, it's since sliced a thousand lemons. Maybe the first or second lemon got the ham flavor, but pretty soon after, though, that flavor has dissipated; you can assume you're getting a later lemon.
  
  
  
  • The final question then becomes: does the bartender have a designated knife, or will he (how often?) run to the hotel kitchen for one? If he has a designated knife, it's used almost entirely for kosher foods, so the thousand-lemon argument would allow it.
  
  
  • Hm; now there's a question -- for what foods does a bartender use a knife? (Anyone here a bartender?) There are plenty of non-kosher drinks at a bar, but those don't need a knife. Lemons, limes, pineapple -- all kosher. (Well if you're in Israel you have shmita/teruma/maaser issues, that's a whole different question.) Cocktail onions or maraschino cherries? Who cuts those? Yes, as far as I can see, the only use for a bartender's knife is plain fruit.