Is combining beef and milk bad for you?

Answer 1

If it was, all the people who eat cheeseburgers or beef stroganoff would be in a world of hurt.

This comes from Exodus 34:26--do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.

I have given some thought to the Biblical dietary laws, and they all seem to be a product of their time. The Exodus 34:26 law restricting you from eating dishes made from both meat and milk was probably born of food shortages. If you had some meat and some cheese or milk, you could make one meal from the meat and another from the dairy - or one meal from both foods combined. When food is as short as it was when the Jews were fleeing Egypt, stretching food was critical.

The list of "clean" and "unclean" animals in Leviticus 11 is also a product of its time. The "unclean" animals are all ones that cause disease when eaten raw or when handled at all. Swine are specifically listed as an unclean animal; eating uncooked or undercooked pork causes trichinosis. Shellfish, which hath not fins nor scales, are unclean because there are four different kinds of shellfish poisoning. The elders who made the dietary laws didn't know about paralytic shellfish poisoning or diarrheal shellfish poisoning; they did know that when people ate clams that were harvested when the ocean was brown in color, sometimes the people died. Since clams are not the only thing people had to eat, it was a lot easier to tell people "God says don't eat clams" than to research shellfish poisoning and set up a system for predicting red tides. Today we can harvest and eat shellfish safely; then they couldn't.