Why did certain religions ban pork?

[GlennB]

I can't see a mention yet of the pork tapeworm, Taenia Solium^WP.

Its life-cycle depends on the pigs' food being contaminated with tapeworm eggs from human faeces, and it strikes me as posssible that the link between tapeworm infestation and pigs was spotted way back in societies where some folks (the nomadic herder types dependent more on goats etc) spurned the pigs that gave city types their alien gut critters. Maybe.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Tartare is not safe to eat.

Steak Tartare

But hey, on the other hand, it's delicious.

 

[ddt]

I'm afraid I really do not know. I suppose if some form of preservation of meat was done then it implies more than a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect when it comes to food and presumably health.

The French wiki page on meat preservation has some interesting info.

In 1836, a Frenchman named Burnet measured how long various meats kept well in a temperate climate. See the table on that page. Beef and pork came out equal (4 days in summer, 8 days in winter). Interestingly, wild boar (sanglier) came out much better, near the top of the list, while mutton and lamb (agneau) came out much worse. Goat is not included in the list.

Secondly, beyond that date meat changes colour, develops a foul smell (and eventually rots). I think those symptoms are within the reach of a less advanced society to understand that it's not a good idea to eat.

As to meat preservation in antiquity, Diodorus of Sicily mentions a Persian tribe at the time of Alexander the Great salting their meat. The ancient Greeks did so too. Polybius (2th Cent. BC) mentions that the Gauls salted or smoked their meat and exported it the whole year round to Rome. Especially the Belgians were famous for their hogs and their sheep: they could provision most of Italy with pork and woolen coats.

(Obelix would be green with envy of such remarks).

And from the wiki page on salt:

Salt was included among funeral offerings found in ancient Egyptian tombs from the third millennium BC, as were salted birds and salt fish. From about 2800 BC, the Egyptians began exporting salt fish to the Phoenicians in return for Lebanon cedar, glass, and the dye Tyrian purple; the Phoenicians traded Egyptian salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout their Mediterranean trade empire.

So yes, salting as a means of food (meat) preservation has a very long history, long preceding the Hebrews.

ETA: Leviticus 2:13

13 Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

So yes, salting as a means of food (meat) preservation has a very long history, long preceding the Hebrews.

ETA: Leviticus 2:13

13 Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings.

"... and further, ensure that all your grain offerings have salt added to them."

 

[angrysoba]

There is no evidence in the holy books of the Jews that they had ever made the conceptual leap that would have meant they could have based their taboo of pork on the incidence of say trichinosis.

None at all. Although this was not what I said.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Sharing food is a pretty much universal friendship gesture. Food taboos are easy to instil in the young and can easily reach the point where the avoidance of the taboo food is almost impossible to overcome or even cause a physical reaction. If you want to make sure the people of your tribe don't mix with the people of another tribe it's a good way to achieve it.

Incidentally, IIRC the way that archaeologists distinguish early Jewish settlement from the surrounding tribes is the lack of pig bones in the middens so if there were great benefits to avoiding pork they weren't obvious to anyone else.

 

[porch]

Perhaps we should question the question somewhat. Pork is a food restriction that is highly noticeable in my culture. I've never had the experience of having to change my plans of bringing a hyrax dish to the potluck upon being reminded that the Brownsteins are on the guest list. But if we look at the entirety of Leviticus 11, swine is just one of many unclean animals. Pigs are ruled out by category, since animals need to both chew their cud and have cloven hooves to be acceptable. (Side note: according to Wikipedia, the hyrax does not chew its cud as is claimed in Leviticus. They walk on four paws, though, making them taboo anyway.) So I don't think there is much reason to begin our inquiry into Biblical food restrictions with the pig, besides cultural bias. Why the prohibition on camels, hares, flying ants, owls, reptiles, and so on?

I see the sense in the tribal reinforcement angle. The restriction reinforces the culture, the culture reinforces the restriction, in a never-ending loop of credulity. On its own, however, I find this unsatisfying as an answer, because it doesn't account for the origin of any one rule over another.

It is hard for me to not see some of it as primitive attempts at hygiene and food safety. We will probably never know for certain. I keep thinking of the superstitious pigeons. The same tools that allow them to find useful patterns also make them dance around like a bunch of goofs for no good reason at all, seeing patterns where there are none. I don't see why we would expect humans to behave much differently, especially when lacking the very language of methodical empiricism, lacking a recorded body of scientific knowledge, or the technology to pursue their own inquiries effectively. So perhaps some food taboos are rooted in pragmatic concerns and some are rooted in imaginary concerns, and from there the beliefs became reinforced in the usual ways that pre-existing beliefs do.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

... I'm just saying that some extension of that to pork meat doesn't seem out of the question.

Except there's a flaw in your hypothesis when you try to turn that into an actual connection between health and the taboo.

First, the connection between upsetting the virgin and the crops failing was purely superstitious. So sure, a superstitious reasoning could be behind the taboo.

But if you want to then go on and say the superstition was based on the connection between pork and trichinosis, it fails on many levels which I've already pointed out. An observer at the time, without modern medical science and microscopes would not see any connection between pork and disease.

The disease effect would not be immediate enough to make the connection.
The disease effect is too hit or miss to look related to pork because lots of people who eat pork wouldn't have any symptoms.

Do you know that tuberculosis was not believed to be an infectious risk to health care workers as late as the 1950s? The reason was the pattern of affected people was misleading. People infected as children became sick as adults. People who were infected working with patients might not get sick for years or might not get sick at all. When one relies only on the pattern of disease one observes, diseases like TB and trichinosis simply don't match up to the actual source. Without a microscope and the germ theory, you just can't detect a pork parasite connection.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I've managed to find some of Marvin Harris' "Cows, Pigs and Watches" here on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/Cows-Pigs-W...=UTF8&qid=1364969056&sr=8-1#reader_0679724680

So, the idea is that Maimonides' theory that it was a public health issue is basically right but in Harris' case the public health issue is not just related to food hygeine but rather that, as you say, pigs have to keep cool and will either use scare water or their own excrement, neither of which will endear them to people. And, as you say, they eat the same food as humans, so they damage the supply of resources human societies need. The taboo is there to warn everyone else not to drain supplies with their extravagant animals.

Hmmm...interesting. Thanks for the heads up on that, Bikewer.

How do you explain the fact other people in the same region raised pigs?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

OK. It might have been an "Us" v "Them" rule, I accept that. The question then becomes: What is it about pig-meat that caused the ancient Hebrews to shun pork?

In answer I would say: According to the consensus around here that the ancient Hebrews were Goat Herders, they harboured a resentment for the affluent Pig Farmers who weren't nomadic and lived in big fancy cities (with all their wicked city ways). The Hebrews were out on the hillsides and parched hinterland trudging around from season to season with their scruffy herds of scrawny goats, while the big-city pig-farmers gorged themselves on baconfat kebabs. (No doubt they were also rogering themselves senseless and enjoying it way too much because of their intact foreskins).

So what do the ancient Hebrews do?
They make a virtue of necessity and then get thoroughly carried away with it, as usual.

This makes sense.

I also looked up the history of domesticating pigs and while it arose independently in several areas of the world, in the area of the Abrahamic religions, it likely arose in one ethnic group first, creating a "them" to the people who had not adopted the new food source.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The "cause and effect" I am speaking of is limited to the actual conceptual underpinnings of disease. (See my original post.)

Our understanding of disease today seems so clear and so "obvious" to us that we think it is something almost trivial and just a matter of "common sense" to have worked out - the historic evidence shows that it was anything but obvious and needed a lot of very uncommon sense to work out.

Recent in terms of human soceities examples that relate to this:

We were still building hospitals (and in the UK many are still in use!) in the 19th century designed with the "Miasma" theory of disease in mind. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory).

Even the spoiling of food was not understood - so we have the idea of "spontaneous creation", with its roots back in the time of Aristotle, lingering into the 19th century.

There is no evidence in the holy books of the Jews that they had ever made the conceptual leap that would have meant they could have based their taboo of pork on the incidence of say trichinosis.

Exactly. The history of Dr Snow, the Broad St pump and the 1800s cholera epidemic in London is a fascinating account of scientists rejecting overwhelming confirming scientific evidence in favor of their confirmation bias.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Perhaps we should question the question somewhat. Pork is a food restriction that is highly noticeable in my culture. I've never had the experience of having to change my plans of bringing a hyrax dish to the potluck upon being reminded that the Brownsteins are on the guest list. But if we look at the entirety of Leviticus 11, swine is just one of many unclean animals. Pigs are ruled out by category, since animals need to both chew their cud and have cloven hooves to be acceptable. (Side note: according to Wikipedia, the hyrax does not chew its cud as is claimed in Leviticus. They walk on four paws, though, making them taboo anyway.) So I don't think there is much reason to begin our inquiry into Biblical food restrictions with the pig, besides cultural bias. Why the prohibition on camels, hares, flying ants, owls, reptiles, and so on?

I see the sense in the tribal reinforcement angle. The restriction reinforces the culture, the culture reinforces the restriction, in a never-ending loop of credulity. On its own, however, I find this unsatisfying as an answer, because it doesn't account for the origin of any one rule over another.

It is hard for me to not see some of it as primitive attempts at hygiene and food safety. We will probably never know for certain. I keep thinking of the superstitious pigeons. The same tools that allow them to find useful patterns also make them dance around like a bunch of goofs for no good reason at all, seeing patterns where there are none. I don't see why we would expect humans to behave much differently, especially when lacking the very language of methodical empiricism, lacking a recorded body of scientific knowledge, or the technology to pursue their own inquiries effectively. So perhaps some food taboos are rooted in pragmatic concerns and some are rooted in imaginary concerns, and from there the beliefs became reinforced in the usual ways that pre-existing beliefs do.

It's easy to believe this false meme that there was some health benefit in avoiding pork, and it was somehow found accidentally (aka using superstitious reasoning) because it sounds logical to us given our modern medical knowledge. We repeat the meme and it sounds logical to the next person and on and on it goes. Stop it. Force yourself.

To one who looks more closely, it just doesn't add up and it actually isn't logical when you look at the deeper facts rather than the 'sounds good' surface assumptions being mistaken for facts.


There were attempts at maintaining health in the Bible. In Leviticus people are instructed to keep people with "lesions" out of the village for a week, the priest then checks the visitor, and lets him in if he's OK or extends the sentence another week. Lepers where shunned out of fear, I believe. But you would be amazed (from the sound of your post) at how little ancient people understood about health and illness. Doctors in the late 1800s still didn't believe hand washing mattered despite all their patients dying of infections.

 

[angrysoba]

Except there's a flaw in your hypothesis when you try to turn that into an actual connection between health and the taboo.

First, the connection between upsetting the virgin and the crops failing was purely superstitious. So sure, a superstitious reasoning could be behind the taboo.

I don't think that makes a difference. Superstitions tend to require some rudimentary belief in cause and effect (if you walk under the ladder you get bad luck etc...), there's no requirement that they be true for them to be grounded in cause-and-effect and it is the idea that they had no idea of such things that I am countering. I am not countering the idea that they had some impeccable sense of cause-and-effect.

But if you want to then go on and say the superstition was based on the connection between pork and trichinosis, it fails on many levels which I've already pointed out. An observer at the time, without modern medical science and microscopes would not see any connection between pork and disease.

I don't. I have never once mentioned trichinosis.

The disease effect would not be immediate enough to make the connection.
The disease effect is too hit or miss to look related to pork because lots of people who eat pork wouldn't have any symptoms.

I would say it would depend on what kinds of disease we are talking about. If some people ate rotten swine and vomitted and **** themselves to death then it may have an eyebrow-raising effect. Given that speculation is pretty much all we have it seems no more far-fetched to think that some kind of serious illness could have come from pigs other than microscopic worms.

Do you know that tuberculosis was not believed to be an infectious risk to health care workers as late as the 1950s? The reason was the pattern of affected people was misleading. People infected as children became sick as adults. People who were infected working with patients might not get sick for years or might not get sick at all. When one relies only on the pattern of disease one observes, diseases like TB and trichinosis simply don't match up to the actual source. Without a microscope and the germ theory, you just can't detect a pork parasite connection.

I am not making that claim.

 

[angrysoba]

How do you explain the fact other people in the same region raised pigs?

More resources? Chance? A combination of factors? Who knows?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

More resources? Chance? A combination of factors? Who knows?

The fact pigs are currently raised by the world's poorest societies, and that pigs were raised by other groups in the same area the pig taboo emerged suggests hypotheses of the animal being costly to raise are likely to be false.

That doesn't rule out competing with a different domesticated animal or just being incompatible with a lifestyle.

My point is we need to stop repeating memes that just sound good to us and actually consider the evidence.

As for the health hypothesis, if you weren't referring to trichinosis, what health issue were you referring to?

 

[Polaris]

Tartare is not safe to eat. Raw shrimp doesn't taste good, I don't think eating it is particularly hazardous. Raw oysters, OTOH, can transmit all sorts of things.

Steak Tartare

Kitfo is absolutely worth the risk, though.

 

[porch]

It's easy to believe this false meme that there was some health benefit in avoiding pork, and it was somehow found accidentally (aka using superstitious reasoning) because it sounds logical to us given our modern medical knowledge. We repeat the meme and it sounds logical to the next person and on and on it goes.

I made no claim about the "health benefit in avoiding pork". The first half of my post is an attempt to channel the conversation away from being specifically about pork in the first place. And when I said, "It is hard for me to not see some of it as primitive attempts at hygiene and food safety," I chose that wording so as to acknowledge my cultural bias. You seem to agree, at least in part, by accepting shellfish allergy as a plausible origin of shellfish prohibition. And the Food Taboos to Protect Human Health section from the article you linked to in post #71 seems to give credence to what I'm saying. http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/5/1/18

The article lists a plethora of reasons for the origins of specific food taboos, and emphasizes that it is erroneous to look for a single reason for all of them. And while tribal identification may well be the perfect explanation for the perpetuation of food restrictions, it has zero explanatory power for the origin of any food restriction, like why some tribes would be counting hooves instead of nipples, eg.

 

[GlennB]

An observer at the time, without modern medical science and microscopes would not see any connection between pork and disease.

They wouldn't? You can state this confidently?

How about empiricism? Didn't older, non-scientific cultures notice some pretty important stuff? Correct stuff, as it happens?

They didn't need modern medical science, microscopes etc, to learn that milkmaids were less susceptible to smallpox - they just noticed it - and that mere observation later led to a deeper understanding of the science.

Similarly, why wouldn't country goatherders simply notice that they suffered fewer tapeworms than townsfolk? Might they not also notice that pigs were pretty fond of scoffing human excrement, to the extent that pigs were deliberately penned at the outflow of privies?

 

[Belgian thought]

The fact pigs are currently raised by the world's poorest societies, and that pigs were raised by other groups in the same area the pig taboo emerged suggests hypotheses of the animal being costly to raise are likely to be false.

That doesn't rule out competing with a different domesticated animal or just being incompatible with a lifestyle.

My point is we need to stop repeating memes that just sound good to us and actually consider the evidence.

As for the health hypothesis, if you weren't referring to trichinosis, what health issue were you referring to?

Which does raise the question. Why were pigs being raised? And for what reason? Do we have any evidence for that?

I would suggest that pigs were being raised and not running wild in towns and villages i.e. they were cultivated.

Were the cultivators likely to of a certain caste who were deemed abhorrent? Maybe they ate their stock? Wild pigs would have been slaughtered, hunted etc.. since they would destroy our new founded cultivation.

We bred them.

If we are happy with the above, we can construct social arguments as to why the eating of such animals was deemed wrong.

My own quick research shows that pig leather for example is/was deemed smoother and better than cow – luxury goods no less! Also the bristles were/are good - we still have hog hair brushes for painting.

For all we know, they could have been prized beasts, but maybe the cultivators not.

It could be that this as nothing to do with 'medical' reasons since in those days we believed unhappy gods, ghosts, phantoms and so on caused illnesses.

Quite a leap in those days to to say “Yes, all the above create illnesses (the gods/ether/spirit/flux etc.). er.... but so do shrimp or pig” , (both feeders of crap incidentally, but one at least, as I mentioned, was cultivated then, maybe the other was too, Google about shrimp farms in Vietnam and see what they feed them).

I reiterate, the question 'Why were pigs being cultivated in the first place and by whom, and for what reason?' might be a different/better starting point in finding an answer.

Personally I would love to hear from someone who knows about the history of pig rearing.

P.S. Look at the recent Halal meat débâcle recently in the UK. Both sides arguing the veracity of their flesh, both human and animal. What a waste...

 

[angrysoba]

The fact pigs are currently raised by the world's poorest societies, and that pigs were raised by other groups in the same area the pig taboo emerged suggests hypotheses of the animal being costly to raise are likely to be false.

That doesn't rule out competing with a different domesticated animal or just being incompatible with a lifestyle.

My point is we need to stop repeating memes that just sound good to us and actually consider the evidence.

Why do you get to do it and nobody else?

Remember that nobody actually knows why pork is prohibited by Jews and Muslims, but different theories are being suggested.

You suggest the theory that a prohibition on pork set Jews apart from other groups as a kind of identification. Fine, but why is your evidence any stronger than other theories?

Why pork and not other meat?
Why did the Jews do this and not someone else?
Why the stipulations about cloven hooves and chewing not of the cud?

Your theory, or meme-repetition, doesn't account for these apparently arbitrary factors any more than your questions about why other groups did not see pigs as a health risk strong enough to forbid pork.

As for the health hypothesis, if you weren't referring to trichinosis, what health issue were you referring to?

I'm not referring to a specific disease; I am suggesting, perhaps, the outbreak of Disease X, which may have come early in the domestication of pigs. Perhaps some deadly plague. It may have been localized and not affected other groups. It could have been one of those diseases that even in Jesus stories was said to have sent pigs into the river to drown when possessed by devils. We simply don't know what type of diseases with far more obvious symptoms than trichinosis could have occurred. I think we don't know enough to rule out the public health explanation.

But here's an idea:

Why not some kind of foot-and-mouth (cloven hooved and not chewing of the cud?) disease which would be visible to even the most primitive of primitive savages.

I don't know when foot-and-mouth disease was first noticed, but remember I am not talking here about when it was classified as a virus or anything like that, or even foot-and-mouth particularly.