Caveat emptor: I am a vegetarian, and I have been for 30 years. So is my husband, and so are my three teenaged boys, since birth, and now by adult choice. So is my husband’s brother, my sister-in-law and all five of their kids.

So if I add my voice to the chorus of rabbis and community leaders about the Agriprocessors scandal, it’s only to ask the most obvious – at least to me – questions, the ones that have not yet been asked.

Why are people so incensed over the ethical injustices of only one particular slaughterhouse? Why not talk about the whole meat industry? Why not talk about how our appetite for meat justifies, sustains and ensures the growth of places such as Agriprocessors?

Because that one is kosher, you say, and kosher means ethical, clean and proper, you think. But as many kashrut supervisors and halachic defenders have argued, some in the pages of this newspaper, “kosher” is only a narrow legal category of how animals are killed, not how they live; how they are slaughtered, not how they are treated.

“Kosher” is a matter of how sharp the knife is. It’s “technically” not about the welfare of the people who yield the knife. It doesn’t matter if the meat is organic, fair-trade, healthy or sustainable. It doesn’t matter if it’s processed to the point of being unrecognizable, or if it’s manufacture destroys small farms, or if it’s factory pollutes the environment.

A chemical-laden concoction with no ingredients you can pronounce is technically “kosher” as long as it meets the proscribed halachic requirements of its category. So for example, broccoli with bugs is not OK, but broccoli with poisonous pesticides and picked by oppressed migrant workers is OK. I’ve read countless authoritative kashrut councils and halachic decisors who have decided not to “overstep boundaries” by asking ethical questions about halachic situations. Since when do we separate Halachah from ethics?

In the Torah, the grumbling Israelites beg for meat after a steady diet of manna. When the quails rain down, they stuff themselves with meat until they die. That place of meat-craving is called kivrot hata’avah, graves of lust. That’s what Agriprocessors is, and what every other slaughterhouse is, kosher or not. Be brave and go see for yourself. Its not Tevye’s few happy chickens being killed for Shabbat, believe me. Its a multi-million-dollar breeding and slaughtering machine, and it doesn’t stop for a minute to look around not only at the animals it takes but at the land, water and resources it uses and at the environment it spills its waste into.

I applaud the Conservative movement’s bold initiative to expand the boundaries of kashrut certification to include ethical considerations, and the Reform movement’s recent vote to support it. I applaud the brave Israeli modern Orthodox group Bemaaglei Tzedek, which initiated a kosher certification called Tav Chevrati – meaning “Society’s Seal” – which it will give only to restaurants that both provide disabled access and pay their workers fairly. I hear that in young people in Jerusalem, both religious and not, will no longer patronize bars and cafes that have not earned this certification.

A small grocer in my neighborhood recently mused to me that “local is the new organic.” Bravo to those who insist that “ethical” is the new “kosher.”