The Origin of the Pork Taboo

While it's true marketing can impact how your dollars could actually contribute to better living conditions, I'd just it's defeatist to just throw your hands up and say it doesn't matter.

A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...

It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers

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… I can’t think of one. Organic might be the biggest success, but even then it’s just an alternative, not a consumer-preference-driven revolution in all commercial agriculture.

Showing that you're willing to pay extra for green products (or products that respect animal welfare, etc) creates a competitive environment in which companies can compete on who provides the most green per dollar. Even if those marked up products are all just greenwashed today, it still creates a market opportunity for new companies to come in and outcompete today's greenwashers with products that deliver better green per dollar in the future.

> together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.

Regulations exists to avoid misleading or lying to customers. Many years of deregulation, thou, have increased the number of scams and increased the price of goods and services. Maybe it was not a good idea.

"I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens."

I assume you don't live in a country that forms a government based on elections. If animal welfare mattered enough, it'd be political.

Popular sentiment has had some influence on the human animal, at least. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act

It's not that the price increase itself leads to better conditions, it's that better conditions necessitate price increases.

There are ways to assess whether a product meets one's standards. They may not be your standards, but it would meet the median for consumers.

I can purchase poultry from a local farm that has an on-site health inspector, where chickens are free-range. In ovo sexing is coming later for eggs. On the poultry side, life in battery cages by far leads to the most suffering. Absent that, given the right conditions, I find the poultry inoffensive and most consumers would too.

I agree there should be legislation, and that has been happening at the state-level.

Stop buying meat and eggs from supermarkets…

It's being talked about in the linkdd video.

That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan.

Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical.

Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them.

People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement).

The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us.

Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.

I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.

Yes, the weird truth is that donating a small percentage of your salary to a charity like this is a lot easier than trying to be vegetarian/vegan while still being about as effective.

That site says ~$25 per month, which is not a lot for engineer salaries. Or $50/month if you want to make up for your past choices too.

FWIW I've donated a lot to The Humane League and Giving What We Can's Animal Welfare Fund.

> And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism.

It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.

> We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating?

Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.

As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.

My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.

At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.

We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.

Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.

The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.

Thank you for using "octopodes"!

> Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence

You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being.

Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.

I'm left wondering whether you mean "dogs < pigs < toddlers" or some other ordering.

For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally.

So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).

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).

I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious.

Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.

This is a good thing to point out. I source most of my meat and eggs from local small farms where I know that the animals are raised in good conditions. Partially because I think it tastes better, partially for the ethics of it. Because of that, I pay more.

But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.

> But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell.

Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7.

Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.

> conditions will still be a living hell

I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture.

In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.

Eat your grain and don't pollute peon! No pork chops for you in New World!

This is something I hadn't thought of until the current egg sticker shock. I buy my eggs from a local small farm. I'm still paying more than grocery store prices but my price hasn't changed. Meanwhile the local grocery store has increased by a large percentage. To the point where they're almost the same price.

Maybe your frame of reference is Whole Foods or something. Out here the farmers are wise to people “wanting to spend more for humanely-raised meat” and price it accordingly. It’s considerably more expensive at the farmer’s market than what it costs at a regular grocery store.

> I find it difficult to believe that the list of meats banned by kosher and halal matches the top allergies and disease risk factors as well as it does without some intent

Does it? I agree that the risk of trichinosis from pigs was pretty great until modern disease research, chickens for example are a huge risk of Salmonella, and yet they are both kosher and halal. Conversely, camels are a relatively safe food, but they are not kosher. Rabbits and similar animals are also not allowed, despite being relatively safe. Tortoises and whales are not allowed either, despite not posing any special risks. Neither are eels or catfish, again relatively safe foods.

IIRC the meat and dairy mixing is based on a specific passage of exodus or deuteronomy forbidding boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk, which was a ritual practice of the canaanites at one time and so it may have always been an ethnic-religious differentiation thing.

In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.

Zero evidence for that theory. People didn't know parasites existed so that couldn't have been the reason for abstaining from pork. But if that had been their reason they would also have abstained from chicken because it is even more dangerous than pork (salmonella etc.). But to the best of my knowledge, no religion prohibits eating chicken. Neither could the Jewish priests who created the rule have observed that people who ate pork got sick more often than those who abstained because they didn't. People who eat pork do not have worse health outcomes than people who don't. Also, remember that 3000 years ago meat was a luxury. The average person would eat meat a few times per month at most.

Preventing meat and dairy contacting is based on a moral argument against mixing products of life with products of death. I don’t think it was ever about health.

The pig taboo and the cannibalism taboo may both be grounded in the folly of eating carriers dense with the same diseases that we are vulnerable to. It's the same thing that makes pigs good research animal models of human disease.

https://www.eara.eu/pigs-and-animal-research

If this is the reasoning it's preserved quite poorly in the text and clearly was rapidly abandoned as the reason such a practice was reproduced generation after generation. The shibboleth explanation is the most convincing to my eye.

Secondly, if the health consequences were so obvious, I don't think it'd be one of the world's most popular meats millennia before we had such effective treatments for the parasites that come with swine. Furthermore any persistence in eating it despite knowledge of health concerns would surely point to such a taboo being less likely to be effective.

Third, there's a lot of medical practices we know from the time was known to archaeology and virtually none of it was preserved in the Torah. Even if it is medical advice, it's a rather odd way (rhetorically) to specify a specific danger. Whatever medical policy is there seems to serve the goal of social cohesion. Food preparation has been noted multiple times for confirming long-lost branches of the jewish community when knowledge of hebrew, prayers, circumcision, and other rituals faded.

Finally, this just feels like the wrong way to approach these texts as a primary tool to deconstruct them—without comparison of "sibling" cultures (and the best we can do is what samaritanism? Zoroastrianism at a massive reach?), without archeological positive evidence, there's little room for strong conclusions. The question we should be asking is not where this comes from my why it persisted after people forgot the beginning. Religion may serve as a de-facto method of social control, but to think that the people who constructed such a society were just coating secular policy in a hotline-to-god-special is hard to imagine. Whatever cultural event happened to make the taboo stick was clearly very influential.

However—if there is serious danger associated with which god you worship, having strong, difficult-to-hide signals recognized by both man and god to identify friend from foe is pretty compelling to a such a strongly community-oriented faith.

This has been my understanding too. The cultural reasons arose because until recently pigs gave humans parasites.

humans have eaten shellfish for millions of years, so whats the practical benefit of lessening the variety of foods you intake? The original reasons for these prohibitions were not scientific in the slightest - its all subjective. dont forget they literally believe themselves to be god "chosen people", not my words, it definitely is an us and them thing

It is even more deep that this.

Archeology tells us that common people of ancient Judea/Israel were more flexible in their practice than post-Roman orthodoxy implies.

From Asherah statues to an entire Temple (Elephantine island on the Nile) working in parallel to the Jerusalem Temple.

The matter of strict adherence as a National identity/religious practice became important following the Diaspora following the Rome-Jewish wars.

If this was the case, why Jewish practices from Eastern Europe and the Middle East/North Africa are so aligned?

And even communities that are even further away like Ethiopia, Yemen, and India, are mostly following the same pattern?

Modern Judaism is very much connected to the state of affairs of ancient Israel/Judah from 24 centuries ago.

This is entirely incorrect

What a racist comment. Jewish culture is not "european" culture.

The Philistines settled circa 12-13th century BC. Leviticus in its current form dates to circa 6th century BC. And while the origins of the taboo (as well as Leviticus) goes back further than the 6th century, as the article suggests the taboo seems to enter the culture after the Philistines had established themselves.

As a kid, I remember being taught by the (Catholic) church that my parents attended that the origin of restriction was due to trying to avoid getting the Tsetse fly parasite, which I guess could have been potentially contracted via poorly prepared pork. I have no idea how accurate this explanation is, but it always seemed at least plausible to me that some religious dietary restrictions might have been codified as a way to try to avoid collective health risks at a time; it doesn't seem crazy they might have noticed a pattern people getting sick after eating certain foods and made rules on how to avoid that, and over time they became part of the religious traditions. I'm not religious now though, so it's also possible that my view of what would be a plausible explanation for religious rules is biased.

But logically, there's no reason to believe that other animals can't be possessed by spirits. Maybe pigs were just the closest available thing.

Are you citing the New Testament to make an argument about Judaism?

Is there any reference to pigs being possessed with spirits that predate the New Testament?

Yup.

I'd be delicious.

https://youtu.be/gOE-q20RcDM?si=CrT9aV6SwutgZsAG

Continuation? Or Fork.

>Jews don’t consider themselves evil

For the record I'm not saying that Jews are evil, but if they happened to do any wrongdoings or evil deeds, for example worshipping other fake god in the form of false deity/human/cow/idols/etc beside their one true God they'll be punished accordingly whether in this world or hereafter, or both. This fact is mentioned in Jewish own holy books including Torah and the Bible namely Old and New Testaments (Jesus is a Jew speaking Aramaic - an Arabic like language spoken around Jerusalem during Roman time). This universal God's rule is also applies to Muslim and everyone else as far as Muslim are concerned.

If my memory serves right, it's actually the Vado area in NM than El Paso proper. Whole city stinks to drive through, and on windy days(which is almost every day), your car gets peppered with dung filled straw blowing across the road. Truly cursed drive.

Most people don't care, especially if it means cheap eats.

Sad, isn't it?

My personal theory is that the pork taboo may have emerged from this, with human greed being the catalyst.

I.e. when pig farming became a business, people probably started feeding pigs with literal garbage instead of proper animal feed, to make as much profit as possible. Without science and without the equivalents mechanisms of FDA/USDA, inspecting the produced meat for suitability would probably be nearly impossible. This would eventually lead to a series of public health incidents, which would be straightforward to trace to pork.

This would in turn led the clerics to label pork "unclean", in order to protect the public from such outbreaks. This was efficient since it doesn't need rigorous enforcement of the ban, and also would drive down the demand, thus the incentive to feed your pigs crap.

IIRC on some Pacific islands the 'toilet pig' (the one you fed with your own waste) was a special delicacy. Can't find anything online from a quick Google though.

Also, pigs are known to eat humans from time to time.

> but most no-pork people eat chicken and fish, so...[shrug].

Yeah... watch a few videos of pretty much any kind of industrial scale meat/fish/poultry farming and you'll shit, blood and piss... which isn't even the most revolting/disgusting things you'd witness

Fact. Germans (I am one) are enthusiastic pork eaters, yet the pig makes an appearance in derogatory words e.g. "Schweinerei" for something messy/disgusting or "Sauhund" for a disliked person. Then again, it is also a symbol of luck, e.g. little marzipan pigs, or the expression "Schwein gehabt" for a lucky event.

it's the other way around - ukrainians are depicted as pigs. Сало уронили - героям сала!

Where the hell did you get that idea? We had to deworm the farm dogs all the time growing up. My cousin got tapeworm from a dog's fleas once. Animals that live or work outside will have exposure to parasites, cleanliness is only a partial protection. No animals are totally immune as far as I know.

dogs get worms all the time unless you keep them on dewormer. these days the issue is more eating droppings from rabbits and squirrels and other wild vermin but absolutely happens.

But who eats them?

Eating dogs is also treif.

[flagged]