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Pork has got to be the most polarizing meat — possibly the most polarizing food. Pork
is, by some reckoning, the most popular meat in the world, accounting for more than a third
of global meat consumption. Yet, at the same time, about a third of humanity studiously
avoids eating pigs.
I can't find any hard data on that last point, that's a guess. But Islam, of course, strictly
forbids eating pork. Hinduism is not wild about it. It's safe to say that a very large
share of humanity thinks that this very popular food is inherently unclean, and why?
Nobody knows why. I mean, you might have a reason for yourself why you regard pork as
unclean, but I'm here to tell you that anthropologists and archeologists and theologians have all
been arguing about the historical origins of the pork taboo for a really long time,
and there is no clear scholarly consensus on the matter. Or rather, there is a consensus
that we really aren't sure where the pork taboo comes from, historically.
We get very little help from the primary sources. Here in the Torah is where we first see the
pork taboo codified in Abrahamic religious law — Leviticus and Deuteronomy, both written
down somewhere in the first millennium B.C.E.
Ancient Jewish law says pork is bad because pigs have a cloven hoof but don't chew their
cus, and what does that even mean? Well, "cloven hoof" means a hoof divided into multiple toes.
Here's a horse hoof — it's all one piece. It has no toes. Here's a deer hoof. It's got
multiple toes. It is cloven. Cows, goats and sheep all have cloven hoofs, and ancient Israelites
had no problem with eating cows and sheep and goats. Why? Because in addition to having
a cloven hoof, they also chew their cud. And what does that mean?
Well, one of the biggest differences between you and me and Goatee here is that Goatee
can digest grass and other foods comprised primarily of cellulose. Cellulose is this
really big sugar the makes up the main structural bulk of most plants, and we simply cannot
digest it. It's just fiber. It passes right through us. But ruminants, like Goatee, swallow
grass whole. Bacteria in their guts start fermenting, or breaking down the cellulose,
and then comes the gross part. Goatee barfs up some of that fermented grass and then chews
on it to break it down further before swallowing it again. This is what it means for an animal
to "cheweth the cud." Pigs don't do that. Pig and human digestive systems are very similar.
They basically eat what we eat.
Leviticus and Deuteronomy say pork is bad because pigs have a cloven hoof but don't
chew their cud. This book says absolutely nothing about why that is bad, and this book
is even less help. The Quran here just says that, unless you're starving to death, the
flesh of swine is forbidden, along with carrion and blood, but some people find a context
clue there.
Carrion is rotten meat, usually from an animal that died on its own instead of you slaughtering
it. And carrion is particularly likely to harbor dangerous pathogens and toxins. Likewise,
blood is particularly likely to harbor pathogens. That said, you can kill them through cooking
them, just like you can with any freshly-slaughtered animal product. People eat blood all the time,
but a lot of people look at this list and naturally assume the prohibition against pork
must have been a kind of ancient health and safety code.
This is a theory that gained a lot of traction in the 19th century, when scientists first
made the link between the parasitic disease trichinosis and the roundworms often found
in undercooked pork. Trichinosis was really pervasive in Europe and the Americas in the
19th century, and at that same historical moment, intellectuals in the West were very
eager to reconcile religious teaching with their newfound scientific knowledge. And the
new understanding of trichinosis imbued a kind of scientific logic into the Old Testament,
and that was something that was very attractive to people at the time.
But more recent scholarship casts a lot of doubt on the trichinosis theory.
The American anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote a very influential book in the 1980s
on meat taboos. "My contention," he writes, "is that there is absolutely nothing exceptional
about pork as a source of human disease. All domestic animals are potentially hazardous
to human health."
That much, of course, is indisputably true, and it may have been even more true in the
ancient world, before we had vaccines for things like anthrax. Anthrax is a horrible
bacterial infection that herd animals like cattle and sheep can pass to humans.
There is no evidence at all that trichinosis was particularly pervasive in the ancient
Middle East, and there is no evidence that ancient Middle Easterners even knew of its
existence. In contrast, there is evidence that ancient people knew about anthrax. Anthrax
may have been the fifth plague of Egypt discussed in the Book of Exodus here, and Homer may
have been talking about anthrax in the Iliad.
There's nothing like that for trichinosis and Harris argues there's a reason for that.
Meat parasites cause relatively mild illnesses in people. Most cases are asymptomatic, and
the more serious problems can take years to unfold.
It's not like a poison that kills you within hours of ingesting it. It would have been
really hard for ancient people to perceive any link between meat and the parasitic diseases
it can sometimes cause. And of course there's no particular evidence that trichinosis was
bad in the Middle East, there's no particular evidence that trichinosis was any worse than
any other parasitic disease caused by any other meat. It's simply the case that trichinosis
was bad in 19th century Europe and America when this theory was hatched. This is a simple
case, Harris argues, of modern people projecting their own experiences onto the lives of ancient
people.
One of the earliest written specific arguments as to why pork is bad comes from the Middle
Ages — from Maimonides. Maimonides was a philosopher who bridged the Jewish and Islamic
worlds. He was a Sephardic Jewish Rabbi in service of an Islamic ruler — Salah ad-Din
Yusuf, or Saladin as he's known here in the West. Maimonides was Salidin's court physician
in Egypt, and here's what he wrote about the pork taboo about 800 years ago.
"[T]he principle reason why the Law forbids swine’s flesh is to be found in the circumstances
that its habits and its foods are very dirty and loathsome. [...] If it were allowed to
eat swine’s flesh, the streets and houses would be dirtier than any cesspool, as may
be seen in the country of the Franks."
He's literally talking #$%^ about the Crusaders.
Indeed, pigs are more conspicuously gross than most farm animals. They eat anything.
They eat trash, they eat roadkill, they even eat human excrement. And they wallow around
in mud, potentially even their own excitement. Is this appetizing to you? Probably not.
But here's the big question: Humans are universally revolted by filth. They are not universally
revolted by pigs, and why not? Well one explanation may be that pigs do not universally love filth.
Pigs only resort to filth when we humans leave them no other option.
This right here is theory that Marvin Harris finds most persuasive. The ancient Middle
East used to have a lot more trees, and when wild or domesticated pigs hang around in forests,
they're not nearly as gross. They root around at the base of trees for seeds and nuts and
truffles and things that you and I would be happy to eat. And they don't need to wallow
in the mud because they have shade.
Contrary to what the expression "sweating like a pig" would lead you to believe, pigs
have no sweat glands, and they have small lungs, so panting is not a great way for them
to shed excess heat. In hot sunny climates, like here in the American South, basically
the only way for pigs to get cool is to cover themselves in mud. Given the option, they'll
wallow in clean mud, but if they have to they will wallow in their own excrement.
The theory goes that over the course of the Iron Age, population growth in the Middle
East resulted in deforestation and desertification. Pigs started to have to to wallow to say cool.
Then came urbanization — thousands and thousand of humans living on top of each other and
filling their streets and their city dumps with food scraps and people poo, all of which
attracted pigs who were more than happy to make use of those discarded calories. As people
in the Middle East increasingly came to see pigs in this new, unflattering context, they
started to view pork as inherently unclean. And what's worse, pigs in this context may
have come to compete with humans for food, because remember — pigs can't eat grass.
They like the same kinds of foods we eat — like, you know, grains.
In, say, Ancient Rome, the environment was simply less arid and more rich with food.
Pigs and humans didn't compete. Instead, urban pigs cleaned the streets of waste and converted
it into delicious protein. That same natural synergy helped make pork the favorite meat
of rapidly urbanizing China, to this day.
Harris argues that in the comparatively arid Middle East, pigs became both gross and uneconomical
— a double whammy. The religious prohibitions followed.
Pretty persuasive argument, right? But there are counter-arguments. Goats also eat absolutely
anything, including poop. Jews and Muslims have no religious opposition at all to eating
goat, nor do they have any problem eating chicken, despite chicken coops being almost
as gross as pig styes, and despite chickens not being able to live on grass either. Those
chickens are eating grain — grain that I could be eating instead, directly. They're
competing with me, but maybe a little bit less than pigs would.
Some more recent scholarship indicates that chickens may have simply supplanted pork in
the Middle Eastern diet because they do what pigs do, only better. This is a 2015 paper
from the archeologist Richard Redding at the University of Michigan. He argues that chickens
can live in cramped urban spaces, just like pigs, they convert food scraps into protein
just like pigs, but they do it more efficiently. They make eggs in addition to meat — pigs
don't do that. And chickens are smaller, which means you can just kill one, cook it and eat
the whole thing immediately. That's a big bonus in a hot climate where meat goes bad
really fast once you've slaughtered the animal.
Redding argues that chickens were just better suited to the Middle East than than pigs were
— they simply got there later, and when they did, they supplanted pigs.
But if that were true, why would you need a religious prohibition against pigs? Wouldn't
people just naturally do the thing that worked better?
One thing more recent archaeology shows is that pig eating never really stopped in the
Middle East, and it wasn't just limited to non-Israelites, like the Philistines. Ancient
Jews in various parts of the region ate pig, which makes sense, right? Nobody makes laws
against things that nobody is doing.
What's clear is that once the pork taboo took hold, it became a way for people to distinguish
themselves from other people. Indeed, this is another pretty recent paper I've been showing
you where archeologists found Israelites from the Northern Kingdom were probably still eating
pork when they migrated into the Southern kingdom around the turn of the 7th century
B.C.E. The law we see in the Torah might have been a mechanism of assimilating these northern
Jews into the southern culture that eschewed pork.
In time, the pork taboo became a way for Israelites to distinguish themselves from the Romans.
And then it became a way for the Muslims, who inherited the Abrahamic tradition, to
distinguish themselves from, say, those dirty crusading Franks with their filthy streets.
It's easy to imagine why the pork taboo spread, and why it persists to the point where my
pork recipes here in this global platform get noticeably fewer views than my other meat
recipes. But where the pork taboo first came from, nobody knows for sure.
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And, you know, thank you, piggies.