pareve

adj

1. (Jewish, not-comparable)Of food: that has no meat or milk in any form as an ingredient.

   “My mom made a pareve casserole with soy hot dogs.”

   “"Parev ice" includes Kosher ice and means the substance intended for sale for human consumption which resembles ice-cream and which— / (a) is usually known as Parev ice or Kosher ice, and / (b) contains no milk or milk derivatives, […]”

   “There are on the market many items which resemble such dairy products as coffee cream, sour cream and whipped cream both in taste and appearance but actually are pareve. These are customarily served in the original container to show that the product is pareve despite the dairy appearance.”

   “A food product containing neither meat nor milk, or derived from either is neutral. The Yiddish word parev (parve) or the Hebrew word stam is used to describe this third category. The neutral (parev) category includes (1) everything which grows from the soil: vegetables, fruits, nuts, coffee, spices, sugar, salt, (2) all kosher fish, (3) eggs, and (4) items manufactured from chemicals. Parev foods may be eaten or cooked with either dairy or meat products.”

   “After eating parve food cooked in a meat pot or cut with a meat knife, does one need to wait six hours to eat dairy? Parve food that was cooked in a meat pot [but without any meat in the pot, such as fish cooked in a meat pot] does not require a wait of six hours before dairy may be eaten. […] [Note that our discussion here applies only to dairy food eaten after parve food, not together with it.]”

2. (broadly, figuratively, not-comparable)Neutral, bland, inoffensive.

   “Judaism in Cranford [New Jersey] was pareve, neither milk nor meat; it had no edge to it. I didn't see this for my life. I was idealistic. I wanted to deal with issues of faith and morality, and all they were worried about were their High Holiday seats. But then I found out I really liked the contact I had with people's day-to-day problems.”

   “Just as kosher is used as slang for "legitimate" or "a-okay", pareve has slang connotations, too. A pareve person is wishy-washy and vague; a pareve deed or decision is "neither fish nor fowl," of no great consequence, middle-of-the-roadish.”

   “By values we don't mean the personal preferences that made values clarification strategies of the seventies and eighties so pareve; we mean traditional Jewish virtues, middot or ma'alot.”