We're continuing over here in Daily Halacha. Today we're going to talk about Borer B'Shabbat. A person on Shabbat cannot separate bad from the good: Pesolet min ha'ochel (bad from the good). Pesolet means food that you don't want, food that's not your taste, food that's not your style, or food that's actually bad, that's not edible, like bones of a fish, bones of a chicken, to some people skin of a chicken, or something that you don't like.
Let's say you have a salad, and there's a mushroom inside that has lettuce, tomatoes, and onions with mushrooms, and a person doesn't like mushrooms. He's just not into mushrooms. The mushrooms now have a status of bad, of pesolet, and the rest of the salad bowl is called good; it's called ochel. So the halacha (Jewish law) is: on Shabbat, one is not allowed to remove what he doesn't want from the food, from the plate of food that he's about to eat. For example, let's say a person has a bowl of salad and he doesn't like the mushrooms. One is not allowed to pick up the mushroom with his fingers, with his forefinger. One is not allowed to pick up the fork and throw it out of the plate; that will be borer.
What a person could do, if he knows that someone at the table next to him actually likes mushrooms, is ask him before he separates the mushrooms from the bowl, “Hey, I have mushrooms over here; would you like it? Because I don't like mushrooms.” If his friend says yes, then one is allowed to remove the mushrooms, even though he doesn't like them, because he's doing it for his friend who does like mushrooms. Therefore, he's allowed to remove the mushrooms from the salad. But otherwise, a person cannot remove the mushrooms from the salad.
Another way to do it, if a person wants to be meikel, is for a person to remove a lot of the ochel along with the pesolet. For example, let's say you have a bowl of salad with lettuce in it, and you want to remove the mushrooms. If you remove the mushrooms with a few pieces of lettuce along with them, then there are rabbis who are meikel, who are leaning to say that's mutar (allowed), because he didn't only separate the mushrooms—the bad from the good, meaning the mushrooms from the salad. Over here, you removed some salad that you like along with the mushrooms, so we don't look at it like a separation. Rather, we look at it as if you split the salad in half, which obviously is allowed. So logically, one cannot remove the mushrooms from the salad if he doesn't like them, but if he removes them with a nice amount of pieces of lettuce or onions or tomatoes, then we don't look at it like a separation, bad from good. So therefore, it's allowed.
So when it comes to eating chicken with bones or fish with bones, the halacha is that one is not allowed to separate the bones from a chicken or the bones from a fish. So how does a person eat fish on Shabbat? How would a person eat chicken on Shabbat? You can't expect a person to put the chicken with the bone or the fish with the bone in their mouth, and then take the bone out of their mouth after they're already chewing on the actual meat of the chicken or the fish. So what's the halacha? The halacha is that once the food is on your plate—meaning your plate specifically, not the serving bowl or the serving plates that you bring from the kitchen to the table for everyone to take from, but rather your own individual plate, after you put the piece of chicken on it—right before you're about to eat, you're allowed to separate the bones from the chicken.
What does “allowed” mean? It means trying to put your fork onto the piece of chicken and then start cutting pieces of chicken away before putting it in your mouth. But to deliberately separate the bones from the chicken and then start eating is still not the best thing, even on your plate. Halachically, though, it's allowed once it's on your plate to separate the bones from the chicken. But before that, in the kitchen, or if you're doing it for somebody else, you're not allowed to do that. For a baby, obviously, you can give them a piece of chicken with bones, so you're allowed to separate the bones from the chicken even before you put it on their plate, right before they start eating. But for a regular adult, you're never allowed to separate the bones before it reaches their plate. Once it reaches their plate, right before they're eating and putting the chicken in their mouth, they're allowed to cut a piece of chicken away from the bone or separate the bone and start eating the chicken, but before that, one is not allowed.