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Interestingly, on the front page right now is a discussion titled "The Origin of the Pork Taboo" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410885 https://news.yco
by blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Interestingly, on the front page right now is a discussion titled "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410885
- fxtentacle 2y agoAnd this article says "study from Saudi Arabia, where Brucella is endemic", which I'd say would be a pretty compelling reason not to eat pigs in Saudi Arabia.
- jajko 2y agoI presume you know nothing about islam, but pigs are off the table (and kitchen) without exception. I don't think there is a way to buy it there, same as beef in India for example (even pork I never saw on any menu some 15 years ago when spending 6 months backpacking there, and I saw literally 1 pig altogether in those 6 months).
- Hojojo 2y agoFrom how I understand it, pigs became taboo because they are a common disease vector. There's nothing fundamentally different between pigs, horses, and cows/bulls which would otherwise motivate banning one over the other. One could apply the same thing to cows in India, where the benefits of keeping cows (milk, dung, labor) outweigh the benefits of slaughtering them for food while also being more sustainable.
- frontfor 2y agoYes, since there’s nothing more powerful than religious belief, how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing? By codifying it as an iron-clad zero-tolerance word-of-god holy decree, so much so that adherents aren’t even cognisant of the mechanism at play.
- hoseyor 2y agoYou’re being rather spiteful and conceited with your hindsight. For all intents and purposes, the risk to people in the past of losing anyone to some disease they didn’t even know existed, which was not only disabling but also drained resources and energy from the whole group, would have simply not allowed “non-iron-clad” rules that could have led to the total destruction of the tribe/group. Those religious iron-clad decrees could very well be the only reason any of us exist at all, because it allowed people to not just forget, e.g., that time when the tribe ate a big pig feast and 99% of the tribe died.
- ttyprintk 2y agoI would say that these kinds of religious edicts discourage investigation and development. The authority to elaborate on dietary taboos is then an expert on an ancient language, (trying to tell if an animal is “cloven hoof” by a murky description) rather than a scientist. Any God not spiteful nor conceited would want us to learn how to boil water; to learn by using thought.
- sorokod 2y ago> how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing? Why should health risk vectors be framed as religious prohibitions? Shouldn't accumulated observations and common sense, developed since the early Iron Age, be sufficient? For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis? [1] https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0311.htm https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0311.htm
- graemep 2y ago> For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis? Possibly at much lower risk. It appears that this particular dangerous form of brucellosis is not even distributed across regions and this case seems to related to feral rather than farmed pork. The Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean at the time did eat pork, presumably without a high disease risk, so I would guess the risk was lower in the populations and places from which non-Jewish early Christians came.
- kragen 2y agoHorses and cows have much better-smelling poop than hogs do, and they generally won't eat human poop, rotting garbage, fallen soldiers on battlefields, or small children that happen to trip and fall. Hogs will eat all of these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet We don't really know the origin of the taboo, but there are more candidate explanations than just epidemiology.
- codr7 2y agoExcept pigs have a lot more in common with humans than the others. Pigs are super intelligent, we have the same blood groups, organ compatibility, piglets smell like newborn babies, their skin is very similar to human skin.
- m0llusk 2y agoActually, there are a number of ways in which pigs and humans share physiology which makes us susceptible to shared disease vectors. Perhaps most obvious is our skin. Pigs and humans are the only land mammals who have what amounts to sea mammal skin, leathery and thick with fat deposits right at the dermis.
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- hoseyor 2y agoIt’s crazy to think that a religious dictate of Islam and Judaism may have its origins in not cooking meat thoroughly or good practices during dressing and butchering.
- h0l0cube 2y agoThose religious dictates were well before germ theory.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoMany religious dictates of the two religions with a standing religious law and polity had a usefulness in the past and a second, slightly different usefulness in the modern era of loneliness, alienation, lack of identity, etc.
- prmoustache 2y agoNot at all. They had identified a global health issue and a potential source without necessarily knowing all the details. Banning pork seemed reasonnable if they couldn't make sure people don't get sick after eating it.
- usrusr 2y agoWhat's crazy about that? Religion used to be long term knowledge encoding (multigenerational). Evolved knowledge, the group that stumbled into a pig taboo just happened to be more successful than the group without. In an area where pigs are better not eaten, either the former would eventually replace the latter or the advantageous knowledge spreads. I'd consider it crazy to think of (the roots of) religion to be anything else.