The Origin of the Pork Taboo

Browsing that page, a state like New Hapshire has one pork farm and one beef farm listed and that's it. These seem like they're more for locals and farm-to-table restaurants?

At my local supermarkets, even the nicer ones like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, I don't ever recall seeing any of those logos on eggs, chicken, beef, anything at all. I'd love to know if I just missed them, though.

> I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm…

Kids toys.

There are a lot of successful wood kids toys brands now that exist as a backlash against plastic toys. Even mainstream retailers now carry an assortment of wood toys.

Melissa and Doug are one of the largest brands, but others exist as well.

To the contrary, that's the entire premise of government regulation and spending.

Most people aren't going to voluntarily send money to the FDA, Social Security, or Medicare, or the courts, or the military, out of the goodness of their hearts. Left to their own devices, they'll freeload. But we all agree these things are important (as evidenced by how we vote), so we pay for them with mandatory taxes.

So your idea that something is nonsensical "if the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that" doesn't hold water at all. Most people won't use their wallets to back anything, if it's left up to them as individuals.

> For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options.

There sure are, e.g. anything plant-based! ;)

> Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).

Produce animal welfare and environmental impact are orthogonal, and maybe even somewhat opposed. But both would indeed be better.

> The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally

This isn't as hard as people make it seem. I live in a city. Yet I participate in a local livestock farm share, the farm is about an hour away. They allow members & prospective members to come in and tour the farm, see the conditions, and their processes. They work to be transparent about everything that's going on. It took me about 10 minutes of googling 15 years ago to find it. The only extra work I've had to do since is once a month go about 30 minutes out of my way to the local pickup spot

Yes, this isn't feasible for every American. Nor could the scale of small farms accommodate that. Yes, it's a luxury. But still, people discuss these things like it's fantasy land and it really isn't.

> make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative

The situations in which this is the case (which are oversimplified by the doc) are so specific and small scale that to think they will address the environmental impact without acknowledging the insane, unsustainable demand for meat is magical thinking. People love to point to ideas like this and stuff like feeding cows seaweed to avoid the reality of the dire need for significant shifts in our consumption behaviors.

> but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

again - the percentage of meat that comes from these conditions is so small as to be virtually irrelevant in the context of the animal agriculture industry

Those claims don't actually pan out in practice. See the Allan Savory vs George Monbiot debate as an example.

It's just feelgood greenwashing for people who don't want to consider changing their diet.

Kind of like the allure of finding people to tell you that butter and bacon are actually superfoods. How convenient that you were already eating those every breakfast.

Interesting framing, I've seen a similar 'If it's a meal, then where's the meat?' attitude from my own family, I've had some thoughts on where it came from, but I think part of it was escaping poverty in my grandparent's generation, and seeing 'success' as being able to afford meat in the first place.

Meat was then a part of every meal, because doing otherwise would be socially... embarrassing? Not necessarily in a conscious way, but in a way it would be like giving you kids gruel. (Not that I have a problem with savoury oatmeal now :P)

Then my parents grew up in that environment, and it was just part of the landscape of life. Meals have a meat ingredient. Or meat is the meal.

There's a similar resistance to breakfasts that aren't egg-based. (honorable mention oatmeal again for breaking through) Or a similar resistance to eggs as the protein source for dinners, notice it just doesn't happen in north american cooking very much. Happens in other cuisines all the time though.

I don't think it needs to be some deep seated gene-based flaw (at risk of putting words in your mouth) it only needs to be 'normal', and there's massive resistance to changing what's 'normal' when diverging from 'normal' isn't immediately more emotionally or physically comfortable than staying. Sometimes even then, if it makes you an outlier in the social landscape.

We realized a similar thing during Covid, when my parents couldn’t find milk on the shelves and we had farmers a few miles away from us dumping it down the drain.

Buying local has an outsize influence for the small increase in price.

This is a funny one because your intuition is wrong on chickens, just not in the way you think. When do you think chickens started to be reared for meat?

It simply could be that it didn't need to be proscribed because it was never done.

You don't need to know about parasites to recognize a correlation between diet and death. People are very good at detecting patterns.

I would rather think it was about idolatry/other gods. Boiling a kid in its mother's milk sounds like a ritual, symbolic act of cruelty - pretty tame by Levantine standards, with its brazen bulls and child sacrifices.

If you believed the gods were sadistic bastards, whose power you could call on with an act of cruelty - it wouldn't be such a strange thing to believe, after a rough period of hundreds of years where cruel people rewarded again and again - then a little symbolic cruelty to whet Baal's appetite might seem like a clever move.

This is what I have heard as well. However, imagine the gastrointestinal distress one would have after consuming spoiled milk and not so fresh meat...

This just isn't true at all.

Pigs are used when we need models of physiology, like entire organ systems --- to know how something will affect large organ systems (this is also why xenotransplantation focuses on pigs so heavily). They aren't otherwise special when it comes to animal models of human disease. In terms of popularity as disease models they are a footnote. They're so infrequently used that the average survey of animal models of human disease will mention them only in passing, at best. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/21/15821

Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.

Again, it pays to notice specific details.

A previous poster mentioned boiling in milk as mixing death (boiling/eating) with life (milk), as a sort of generic badness.

As giraffe_lady just reminded us, the original prescription is boiling the baby in it's OWN MOTHER's milk. This is not a "put cheese on hamburger" situation, it is an explicit expression of cruelty to the mother and to her baby.

And the prohibition was put in place because boiling babies in their mother's milk was considered a delicacy back then. People used to do horrific shit, celebrating cruelty.

Was it before or after the American cheeseburger? Because that's the main example we use as to what that restricts. I don't, for instance, know if that applies to chicken fried chicken.

All of the weird rules in the bible suddenly start to make sense in the context of an early human civilization "survival guide." Don't make clothes out of two different fabrics because one will wear faster than the other and it causes waste. Monogamy / rules about adultery are for stopping the spread of STDs. Don't mix crops on the same field because it makes it harder to tend to the plant's individual needs. Not boiling a calf in its mother's milk was probably less about the literal act and more about it being sub-optimal to slaughter calves when you have a mature animal available.

I think this analysis could be theologically consistent as well because that's a pretty smart play by a God who's trying to get us to be successful, but who also has to make compromises for early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them. It also provides a theological basis for the fact that "Cafeteria Catholics" are the norm because we've outgrown / understand better the basis for those rules.

When times are good, it’s everyone for themselves, and individuals can entertain various identities and alliances. But when times are tough, community is protective, and individuals have to pick a side.

Sounds like modern politics.

They were not so aligned until the 20th-century when Jews from all communities mixed again. I am not disputing that Jewish practices today and for the last two millennia are connected to practices in Judea at the turn of the first millennium and to texts that had been written even earlier. What I'm saying is that strict and regulated adherence by large parts of the population came relatively late. That, as far as I can tell from the research, is not at all controversial.

Tapeworm would be from the dog, not the fleas, but you are right about the rest.

How do you get a tape worm from dogs fleas? This thing spreads over excrements, but not in dogs.

Dogs are totally clean, and they are immune. You must exercise your immune system to get used to it.

In the US? Not many. We also don't eat horse, cat, and in general don't eat elk, deer, squirrel, possum, racoon, or boar; but some people do. Most people in the US don't eat things you can't buy at supermarkets.

I guess you may eat some if their saliva, or excrements, or dander by accident. It gets everywhere. But there is nothing to be afraid of.