7 ms·
Much as the article makes good points, I find it difficult to believe that the list of meats banned by kosher and halal matches the top allergies and disease ri
by trws 2y ago
Much as the article makes good points, 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. Pork was, until very recently, the greatest risk for parasitic infection, insects in a similar spot. Shellfish are the top meat allergy, by a whole lot. Most of the rest of the rules about preparation amount to good practices for ensuring cleanliness or at least reasonable preservation and parasite prevention. There are exceptions, I can’t think of a practical reason for not allowing meat and dairy to come into contact, but the vast majority would have kept people healthier.
Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.
- zappb 2y agoPreventing 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.
- MisterTea 2y agoThis is what I have heard as well. However, imagine the gastrointestinal distress one would have after consuming spoiled milk and not so fresh meat...
- SSLy 2y agoone could also eat a ripe pear with such milk and experience similar unpleasantness
- vintermann 2y agoI 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.
- kragen 2y agoTecnically Sicily isn't actually in the Levant and Phalaris wasn't born until about 700 years after the period in question.
- delichon 2y agoThe 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 https://www.eara.eu/pigs-and-animal-research
- light_hue_1 2y agoThis 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 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/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- delichon 2y ago> Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ This article doesn't include a comparative risk assessment. Why are you confident that pigs and chickens have a similar risk? Do you think that the idea that we are more at risk from more similar animals is mistaken? I imagine that the risks are very different in the modern factory farming context compared to when we lived intermingled with our livestock. The disease risk may be more in the animal behavior than its physiology, for instance if pigs are more friendly or curious or dirtier than chickens or cows, or if their shit is less solid. Or if their wallows are disease reservoirs.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoIIRC 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.
- genewitch 2y agoWas 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.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoExodus predates the cheeseburger by a good few years I'm pretty sure yeah.
- genewitch 2y ago> How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoOh I see, sorry. Yeah the generalized prohibition is older than cheeseburgers but I'm not sure by how much. I believe I have read about rabbis discussing it in the middle ages but I may have misunderstood. I don't know that much about rabbinical judaism frankly.
- Philadelphia 2y agoIt’s at least 1400 years older than cheeseburgers
- dcow 2y agoThis has been my understanding too. The cultural reasons arose because until recently pigs gave humans parasites.
- Spivak 2y agoAll 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.
- mr_toad 2y ago> Monogamy / rules about adultery are for stopping the spread of STDs. And preventing unwanted pregnancies, and partly to stop a few men from monopolising all the women.
- michaelsbradley 2y agoThe adjective cafeteria connotes "choosing". Note that the word heresy derives from Greek haíresis (αἵρεσις) meaning "choice" or "option". With respect to Christianity, heresy-choosing has been around a long time, there's been no outgrowing of any kind. It's just that heresy is more prevalent in some centuries than in others. Arianism, for example, was rampant for several centuries. In our own time, the choosing (against) is mainly focused on teachings related to sexuality and marriage.
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- bjourne 2y agoZero 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.
- samspot 2y agoYou don't need to know about parasites to recognize a correlation between diet and death. People are very good at detecting patterns.
- alejohausner 2y agoSailors used to die from scurvy in large numbers, before a connection to diet was discovered. People aren’t as smart as you claim.
- airstrike 2y agoThat argument doesn't hold, it's false equivalence. It's much harder to detect the lack of some nutrient in your diet overall vs the consequences of eating a specific meat.
- platybubsy 2y agoDoesn't this kind of prove his point? People got sick a lot before they found a pattern and fixed their diet.
- oyashirochama 2y agoMost of that can be explained by it being the first time to have a long-term trip without fresh fruit and it was discovered fairly quickly, they just didn't have anything that persevered vitamin C since it denatures fairly easy. Science always has a find an issue, then resolve it any other path is just luck. The sailors of other countries other than Europe did have ways of remedying this issue through various ways.
- simiones 2y ago> 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.
- renewiltord 2y agoThis 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.
- marc_abonce 2y ago> When do you think chickens started to be reared for meat? Since you aren't answering your own question, this is what I could find: "A find in Israel shows evidence of chicken consumption from as early as 400 B.C.E." [1] "The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken." [2] So, depending on how you date the Torah, the timelines may or may not overlap. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-were-first-people-eat-chickens-180956057/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-were-first-peo... [2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conquered-the-world-87583657/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conqu...
- seec 2y agoThe vegan propaganda has worked so well that somehow people now think eating meat (red or otherwise) is something we have been doing only recently and only because we are rich. This view of the world is so wrong I can't believe it. Even very poor people would eat meat, in fact in the middle age they created a tax around salt because it was used both for meat conservation (giving "salaison") and also nutrition for cattle. If salt consumption was just for humans and meat consumption was low, such a taxation would have made absolutely no sense, yet this is what they did.
- ForTheKidz 2y agoIf 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.
- conorjh 2y agohumans 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