9 ms·

Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases. Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual or

Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases. Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high. Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones. Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.

sigmoid10 4y ago
It's still not economical to test e.g. every single pig for roundworms, especially since they do not create clinical symptoms in these hosts and a direct test is rather expensive. But they can pose a significant risk to humans who eat undercooked pork and in the past about 5 percent of Americans were estimated to be infected at any given time. This has only gone down thanks to modern production standards that eliminate or drastically reduce exposure to wild animals that may transmit the disease. Compared to farm animals it's actually pretty easy to contain insects in an environment where they can't get infected with foreign pathogens, since people don't really care about freely roaming larvae.
- nivertech 4y ago
  I've read a medical research paper about the resurgence of some nasty parasitic disease in Israel with the breakdown by religious community[1]. Turns what? The stricter the dietary laws for the community were - the less infections occurred. And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all. -- [1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    I am offended by your unfounded preemptive censorship of facts.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone. Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      I basically agree with that. So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say. And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years. In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.
comradesmith 4y ago
Now my mind is wondering if insects could be a source and transmitter of prion diseases. Perhaps the proteins in bugs don’t line up with humans though.
- helpfulmandrill 4y ago
  Why would this be any more likely than other animals?
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    Perhaps because insects are more evolutionally distant from humans, than mammals for example. That doesn't mean that it's true, but this could be why someone migh assume that it's true.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- drjasonharrison 4y ago
  This might explain how wild deer develop prion diseases. My understanding is that they aren't eating the nervous tissues of other animals but perhaps an insect, parasite, or other lifeform is providing the infection.
  - beauzero 4y ago
    Develop...maybe. CWD can stay dormant in soil for a long time (2+ years). https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prions/ https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prio...
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Deer getting CWD from the soil wouldn't be unprecedented. Sheep get anthrax that way. Animals that keep their head down eating stuff off the ground are particularly susceptible to soil-borne infections.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related; I always joke that shrimps are just under water bugs. Lots of people that are disgusted by one, enjoy eating the other. Disgust is mostly cultural and learned. Obviously, some of our gag reflexes are about detecting things that are bad. Like rotting meat or things that have gone off. But then we ferment and rot lots of things intentionally and the products related to that are loved in some parts of the world and found disgusting in other parts of the world because they trigger the same reflexes as food that has gone off. E.g. a lot of Chinese people might not enjoy french cheeses and likewise the french might not appreciate some the fermented soybeans and eggs that are popular in China. And they eat snails, which with a lot of garlic and butter are actually not horrible but also not something everyone enjoys. Anyway, if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. Cleaning that is a percentage game. Likewise with organic produce you buy at the market. Small mites, spiders, etc. The occasional bigger bugs you might wash away. But a lot of smaller ones end up in your food. It's fine. We've evolved to be omnivores. Most of that meats with the acid in your stomach and gets broken down. Some of the parasites are a bit more nasty and actually can become an issue. Guess how those end up in your stomach. You eat/drink them. Probably intensive farming of fish, ducks, chickens, or bugs does not result in the healthiest animals. Unhealthy animals get sick. Eating sick animals is risky. There are some signs that covid happened like that and there have been other examples of diseases spreading from animals to people via farmed animals traded in poultry markets or wherever.
- nivertech 4y ago
  > Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related ... One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans. Lobster sashimi is much safer than eating a raw crayfish from a river or lake. The latter can cause a serious lungs disease. > if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. I once found a caterpillar inside an eggplant ;)
hsn915 4y ago
> Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. This is the most important bit. Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I thought the generally accepted science was that humans can learn disgust reactions socially, so that they are more adaptable on a non-evolutionary timescale. > The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/ I know a bunch of people who have gone off specific foods after being coincidentally sick and associating the two things.
  - hsn915 4y ago
    How does this invalidate the point? The people who are using their brain to override their disgust system are probably doing something that's extremely maladaptive.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
ls-lah_33 4y ago
Can't cooking solve this problem? Rare meat is problematic for this reason. Also my understanding is that some traditions in Judaism and Islam even for allow insect consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejection_and_cultural_taboo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejectio...
- nivertech 4y ago
  Yes, there are 4 types of locust that are edible according to Kashrut, but my understanding that it's mostly for the environmental reasons - because migrating locusts causing so much damage to agriculture - the Rabbis permitted to eat them (similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans). Lately I heard another explanation by Prof. Yigal Bin-Nun[1], that when so called "Judaism" became an organized religion it simply assimilated the previously existing dietary norms and taboos. And the pork wasn't eaten in the entire area even before the first mention of the Israelites. The exception being the Philistines who brought a European pig and wild boar to Canaan. Recently there was a DNA research paper which confirmed that the wild boars in Israel are of European origins, not local ones. So according to this theory it might be that locusts "whitelisted" by "Judaism" when the Himyarite kingdom was converted, probably because locusts were already consumed before the conversion. Of course it's only my speculation. The more traditional theory on Kashrut origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915 EDIT: yet another theory is that pork was prohibited b/c swine shares some similarity with human anatomy and thus both species can share common diseases. So it was prohibited to eat in order to prevent epidemics/pandemics. There is some mentions of this in Jewish sources, but it mostly sounds like an afterthought. -- [1] https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%91%D7%9F-%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9F https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%9... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58348355 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58348355
  - merry_flame 4y ago
    >> similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans Never heard that argument, but it seems like a misunderstanding. Peter Singer made the point that oysters have no nervous system and are therefore as plant-like as animals can come and probably non-sentient. The fact that oysters clean the oceans would also be a pretty strange argument. That's why there are so chock full of contaminants and pathogens in most places and many countries have special allowances to make them street legal when virtually any other food with the same toxin contents would be banned.
noduerme 4y ago
Religious laws like kosher and halal laws didn't develop from disgust. They engrained disgust to steer people away from contracting trichinosis. That was an exceedingly practical way of putting out a public health message prior to the advent of mass literacy. When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork... so famously, my grandma who didn't speak English went into a butcher shop in Baltimore bought a bunch of bacon without understanding it was pig, and fed a piece of it raw to my father, who was a baby... and the butcher apparently shouted at her not to feed that raw to a kid. Which baffled her. Equally baffling to me, I had a beer at the Munich Hofbrauhaus and watched a kid eat a pile of pork tartare.. which looked delicious.. but when I asked, he seemed shocked. He told me there's no trichinae in Europe now, and it's normal to eat raw pork in Germany.. The world comes at you fast, lol.
- nivertech 4y ago
  The truth is we don't know why and how they developed. I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527 Similarly like only after living 7 years in Israel I discovered that "white meat" is an euphemism for pork. Also the reality is much more complex. We tend to project our current understanding into the past. The reality of keeping Kashrut back then wasn't as we understand it today. -- The lifestyle of Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II - between keeping the mitzvot and secularization [Hebrew] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfrFQH6RzZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfrFQH6RzZc
- jnwatson 4y ago
  “ When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork” I don’t understand how that could occur, since a great deal of pork is produced in Ukraine, both now and historically.
  - kevinmchugh 4y ago
    It may have been their first time in a non-Kosher butcher. Ukraine used to have very large Jewish enclaves.
dgs_sgd 4y ago
I once heard (not sure if it's true) that the Islamic rule for not eating pork was mostly a practical one, because at the time the rule was formulated it was easier to get sick from eating pork relative to other meats.
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  This is the justification for pork bans in the Jewish Kashrut as well. Also why a lot of people are pretty lax on the pork-eating part nowadays
ngvrnd 4y ago
Ah, just run 'em all under a cobalt-60 source. (joke)
- scythe 4y ago
  To irradiate food, you need to keep the photon energy below 1.022 MeV, or you get residual radioactivity due to pair production.
  - DoctorOetker 4y ago
    with pair production I assume you mean electron positron pairs? how is that harmful in food? the lifetime of a positron wouldn't be very long, or is the concern free radicals?
    - DoctorOetker 4y ago
      as I thought pair production is irrelevant in food irradiation the tolerable limits in particle energies and doses are very high for truly tiny increases in induced radioactivity. its really marginal as long as the very conservative limits are respected. see for example: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.p...
      - scythe 4y ago
        Sounds good to me. From a medical standpoint, I'm aware that irradiated food is perfectly safe. It's the political utility of saying "no residual radioactivity" that I was focused on. But I guess positrons probably aren't much different from electrons in causing that.
- brnt 4y ago
  Every single strawberry sold commercially in the Netherlands is irradiated. Not for parasites, but fungus AFAIK.
- DoctorOetker 4y ago
christkv 4y ago
Not that I want to eat them but you could irradiate the insects to kill anything like they do with spices.
bobthechef 4y ago

sigmoid10 4y ago

It's still not economical to test e.g. every single pig for roundworms, especially since they do not create clinical symptoms in these hosts and a direct test is rather expensive. But they can pose a significant risk to humans who eat undercooked pork and in the past about 5 percent of Americans were estimated to be infected at any given time. This has only gone down thanks to modern production standards that eliminate or drastically reduce exposure to wild animals that may transmit the disease. Compared to farm animals it's actually pretty easy to contain insects in an environment where they can't get infected with foreign pathogens, since people don't really care about freely roaming larvae.

nivertech 4y ago
I've read a medical research paper about the resurgence of some nasty parasitic disease in Israel with the breakdown by religious community[1]. Turns what? The stricter the dietary laws for the community were - the less infections occurred. And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all. -- [1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  I am offended by your unfounded preemptive censorship of facts.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone. Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    I basically agree with that. So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say. And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years. In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.

comradesmith 4y ago

Now my mind is wondering if insects could be a source and transmitter of prion diseases. Perhaps the proteins in bugs don’t line up with humans though.

helpfulmandrill 4y ago
Why would this be any more likely than other animals?
- chihuahua 4y ago
  Perhaps because insects are more evolutionally distant from humans, than mammals for example. That doesn't mean that it's true, but this could be why someone migh assume that it's true.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drjasonharrison 4y ago
This might explain how wild deer develop prion diseases. My understanding is that they aren't eating the nervous tissues of other animals but perhaps an insect, parasite, or other lifeform is providing the infection.
- beauzero 4y ago
  Develop...maybe. CWD can stay dormant in soil for a long time (2+ years). https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prions/ https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prio...
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Deer getting CWD from the soil wouldn't be unprecedented. Sheep get anthrax that way. Animals that keep their head down eating stuff off the ground are particularly susceptible to soil-borne infections.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related; I always joke that shrimps are just under water bugs. Lots of people that are disgusted by one, enjoy eating the other. Disgust is mostly cultural and learned. Obviously, some of our gag reflexes are about detecting things that are bad. Like rotting meat or things that have gone off. But then we ferment and rot lots of things intentionally and the products related to that are loved in some parts of the world and found disgusting in other parts of the world because they trigger the same reflexes as food that has gone off. E.g. a lot of Chinese people might not enjoy french cheeses and likewise the french might not appreciate some the fermented soybeans and eggs that are popular in China. And they eat snails, which with a lot of garlic and butter are actually not horrible but also not something everyone enjoys. Anyway, if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. Cleaning that is a percentage game. Likewise with organic produce you buy at the market. Small mites, spiders, etc. The occasional bigger bugs you might wash away. But a lot of smaller ones end up in your food. It's fine. We've evolved to be omnivores. Most of that meats with the acid in your stomach and gets broken down. Some of the parasites are a bit more nasty and actually can become an issue. Guess how those end up in your stomach. You eat/drink them. Probably intensive farming of fish, ducks, chickens, or bugs does not result in the healthiest animals. Unhealthy animals get sick. Eating sick animals is risky. There are some signs that covid happened like that and there have been other examples of diseases spreading from animals to people via farmed animals traded in poultry markets or wherever.

nivertech 4y ago
> Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related ... One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans. Lobster sashimi is much safer than eating a raw crayfish from a river or lake. The latter can cause a serious lungs disease. > if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. I once found a caterpillar inside an eggplant ;)

hsn915 4y ago

> Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. This is the most important bit. Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I thought the generally accepted science was that humans can learn disgust reactions socially, so that they are more adaptable on a non-evolutionary timescale. > The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/ I know a bunch of people who have gone off specific foods after being coincidentally sick and associating the two things.
- hsn915 4y ago
  How does this invalidate the point? The people who are using their brain to override their disgust system are probably doing something that's extremely maladaptive.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago

ls-lah_33 4y ago

Can't cooking solve this problem? Rare meat is problematic for this reason. Also my understanding is that some traditions in Judaism and Islam even for allow insect consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejection_and_cultural_taboo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejectio...

nivertech 4y ago
Yes, there are 4 types of locust that are edible according to Kashrut, but my understanding that it's mostly for the environmental reasons - because migrating locusts causing so much damage to agriculture - the Rabbis permitted to eat them (similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans). Lately I heard another explanation by Prof. Yigal Bin-Nun[1], that when so called "Judaism" became an organized religion it simply assimilated the previously existing dietary norms and taboos. And the pork wasn't eaten in the entire area even before the first mention of the Israelites. The exception being the Philistines who brought a European pig and wild boar to Canaan. Recently there was a DNA research paper which confirmed that the wild boars in Israel are of European origins, not local ones. So according to this theory it might be that locusts "whitelisted" by "Judaism" when the Himyarite kingdom was converted, probably because locusts were already consumed before the conversion. Of course it's only my speculation. The more traditional theory on Kashrut origins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915 EDIT: yet another theory is that pork was prohibited b/c swine shares some similarity with human anatomy and thus both species can share common diseases. So it was prohibited to eat in order to prevent epidemics/pandemics. There is some mentions of this in Jewish sources, but it mostly sounds like an afterthought. -- [1] https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%91%D7%9F-%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9F https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%9... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58348355 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58348355
- merry_flame 4y ago
  >> similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans Never heard that argument, but it seems like a misunderstanding. Peter Singer made the point that oysters have no nervous system and are therefore as plant-like as animals can come and probably non-sentient. The fact that oysters clean the oceans would also be a pretty strange argument. That's why there are so chock full of contaminants and pathogens in most places and many countries have special allowances to make them street legal when virtually any other food with the same toxin contents would be banned.

noduerme 4y ago

Religious laws like kosher and halal laws didn't develop from disgust. They engrained disgust to steer people away from contracting trichinosis. That was an exceedingly practical way of putting out a public health message prior to the advent of mass literacy. When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork... so famously, my grandma who didn't speak English went into a butcher shop in Baltimore bought a bunch of bacon without understanding it was pig, and fed a piece of it raw to my father, who was a baby... and the butcher apparently shouted at her not to feed that raw to a kid. Which baffled her. Equally baffling to me, I had a beer at the Munich Hofbrauhaus and watched a kid eat a pile of pork tartare.. which looked delicious.. but when I asked, he seemed shocked. He told me there's no trichinae in Europe now, and it's normal to eat raw pork in Germany.. The world comes at you fast, lol.

nivertech 4y ago
The truth is we don't know why and how they developed. I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527 Similarly like only after living 7 years in Israel I discovered that "white meat" is an euphemism for pork. Also the reality is much more complex. We tend to project our current understanding into the past. The reality of keeping Kashrut back then wasn't as we understand it today. -- The lifestyle of Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II - between keeping the mitzvot and secularization [Hebrew] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfrFQH6RzZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfrFQH6RzZc
jnwatson 4y ago
“ When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork” I don’t understand how that could occur, since a great deal of pork is produced in Ukraine, both now and historically.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  It may have been their first time in a non-Kosher butcher. Ukraine used to have very large Jewish enclaves.

dgs_sgd 4y ago

I once heard (not sure if it's true) that the Islamic rule for not eating pork was mostly a practical one, because at the time the rule was formulated it was easier to get sick from eating pork relative to other meats.

koshergweilo 4y ago
This is the justification for pork bans in the Jewish Kashrut as well. Also why a lot of people are pretty lax on the pork-eating part nowadays

ngvrnd 4y ago

Ah, just run 'em all under a cobalt-60 source. (joke)

scythe 4y ago
To irradiate food, you need to keep the photon energy below 1.022 MeV, or you get residual radioactivity due to pair production.
- DoctorOetker 4y ago
  with pair production I assume you mean electron positron pairs? how is that harmful in food? the lifetime of a positron wouldn't be very long, or is the concern free radicals?
  - DoctorOetker 4y ago
    as I thought pair production is irrelevant in food irradiation the tolerable limits in particle energies and doses are very high for truly tiny increases in induced radioactivity. its really marginal as long as the very conservative limits are respected. see for example: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.p...
    - scythe 4y ago
      Sounds good to me. From a medical standpoint, I'm aware that irradiated food is perfectly safe. It's the political utility of saying "no residual radioactivity" that I was focused on. But I guess positrons probably aren't much different from electrons in causing that.
brnt 4y ago
Every single strawberry sold commercially in the Netherlands is irradiated. Not for parasites, but fungus AFAIK.
DoctorOetker 4y ago

christkv 4y ago

Not that I want to eat them but you could irradiate the insects to kill anything like they do with spices.

bobthechef 4y ago