[trws]

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.

[simiones]

> 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]

This 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]

> 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-peo...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conqu...

[seec]

The 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.

[giraffe_lady]

IIRC 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.

[fads_go]

Again, it pays to notice specific details.

A previous poster mentioned boiling in milk as mixing death (boiling/eating) with life (milk), as a sort of generic badness.

As giraffe_lady just reminded us, the original prescription is boiling the baby in it's OWN MOTHER's milk. This is not a "put cheese on hamburger" situation, it is an explicit expression of cruelty to the mother and to her baby.

And the prohibition was put in place because boiling babies in their mother's milk was considered a delicacy back then. People used to do horrific shit, celebrating cruelty.

[kelipso]

I don’t see how you can attribute cruelty to it. It won’t be any more or less cruel to boil the calf in a vegetable stock.

Besides, it clearly seems to have been a “don’t copy the ritual process of this other tribe” rule.

[genewitch]

Was 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]

Exodus predates the cheeseburger by a good few years I'm pretty sure yeah.

[genewitch]

> How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.

[krab]

The rabbis wanted to be on the safe side, I guess.

[giraffe_lady]

Oh 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]

It’s at least 1400 years older than cheeseburgers

[bjourne]

Zero 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]

You don't need to know about parasites to recognize a correlation between diet and death. People are very good at detecting patterns.

[alejohausner]

Sailors used to die from scurvy in large numbers, before a connection to diet was discovered. People aren’t as smart as you claim.

[marcus0x62]

I’m not a doctor, but some quick googling indicates that trichinosis symptoms start after a few days of being exposed to the worms, while scurvy symptoms show up after a few months of vitamin C deficiency[0].

I’m pretty sure I - as an ignorant person in this area - could figure out if people around me sometimes ate something, and then got sick within a few days, that maybe I shouldn’t eat that thing.

I doubt I’d be able to figure out that I should eat something on the basis of people getting sick after not eating a whole bunch of things for a few months.

0 - at least one source I found claimed scurvy symptoms could show up as soon as one month after “severe” vitamin C deficiency, but that “more noticeable symptoms would appear later.

[s1artibartfast]

Well, they knew it was tied to sailing, long voyages, and diet.

Scurvy became a problem with the age of sail, and even in the 1500's sailors were recommending citrus, making pine needle teas, and similar efforts.

I think it is amazing that people figured out how to treat and prevent scurvy without a functional understanding of biology, and 300 years before Vitim C was discovered.

I think the fact that they DID figure it out supports the theory more than a couple hundred year delay undermines it.

How many tens of thousands of years did people have to figure it out?

[oyashirochama]

Most 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.

[airstrike]

That 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]

Doesn't this kind of prove his point? People got sick a lot before they found a pattern and fixed their diet.

[bjourne]

No, people are terrible at detecting patterns. It took medicine a few thousand years before Semmelweis came along and detected a correlation between hand-washing and childbed fever. But also there is no pattern to detect, eating pork just isn't unhealthy (American diet notwithstanding).

[arthens]

I'm not weighting in on the ability of people to detect patterns, but hand washing is a bad example.

Detecting a pattern between 2 things that did happened (everyone but Dave ate pork, and everyone but Dave got sick) is orders of magnitude easier than detecting a pattern between something that did happened (this patient got sick) and something that didn't (everyone washed their hands).

[isleyaardvark]

Well only ancient Jewish priests, in this case. Priests who only give the reason that the pig “has hooves and does not chew its cud" for the ban, instead of pointing out a pattern between diet and illness that people could supposedly detect independently.

[sorokod]

True but then why prohibit something that is known and understood by all?

[conorjh]

same way the quran predicted bacteria etc its never stated outright, oddly enough, divine knowledge but always vague and metaphorical

[Aspos]

One does not need a microscope to see a parasite. People were well aware of meat-borne parasites. Salmonella is invisible to a naked eye, true.

[fortran77]

What an ignorant comment. Jewish priests didn't "create" the rule. G-d did.

[zappb]

Preventing 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.

[vintermann]

I 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]

Tecnically Sicily isn't actually in the Levant and Phalaris wasn't born until about 700 years after the period in question.

[MisterTea]

This 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]

one could also eat a ripe pear with such milk and experience similar unpleasantness

[delichon]

The 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

[light_hue_1]

This 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

Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/06/coronavirus-wo...

> “The primary risks for future spillover of zoonotic diseases are deforestation of tropical environments and large-scale industrial farming of animals, specifically pigs and chickens at high density,” says the disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie of Emory University in the US, an expert reviewer of the report.

[delichon]

> Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. 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.

[graemep]

Modern storage and cooking reduces a lot of risks too.

[ForTheKidz]

If 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.

[dcow]

This has been my understanding too. The cultural reasons arose because until recently pigs gave humans parasites.

[Spivak]

All 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.

[simiones]

This would be a cute idea, if it weren't for the fact that all the other people in the region, and outside, who didn't follow any of these practices (and instead had their own specific taboos), lived just as much and created just as powerful kingdoms as those that did.

The clear reality is that most of these rules are just various cultural taboos enshrined as religious rites, some of which are beneficial, many of which are not.

[johngladtj]

There may well be multiple local minimums that get reinforced through habituation.

[michaelsbradley]

The 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.

[Spivak]

I wouldn't exactly say that those are the only two things Catholics in the modern age maintain at odds with church doctrine. Heresy, a lot of heresy, is the norm even among regular attendees at mass. Catholics have mellowed significantly in the west to where it's probably more accurate for a given Catholic to say that they have a personal moral code informed by church doctrine than actually following it because it's doctrine.

[michaelsbradley]

I think we’re mostly on the same page. An extended discussion on particulars is out of scope here, but I’ll try to clarify what I meant:

In the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed relatively little open dissent, public or private, by persons who profess to be Catholic, regarding christology and other beliefs expressed in the Nicene creed, recited during every Sunday Mass. Sure, there is some, if you have particular conversations. But I’ve never witnessed any fuming on those matters in the local or inter/national news. A huge number of folks in the pews who grew up post 1960s are very poorly catechized thanks to the multi-decade Silly Season that left many of a couple of generations of Catholics (up to today) confused at best. So in many cases, regarding christology, the sacraments, etc., people aren’t sure what a lot of it means, so they’re not in much of a position to dissent on those points (to be heretics re: those teachings), they’re just clueless.

That is in contrast to the open specific informed dissent, even rancor, public and private, around topics such as marriage and premarital sex, artificial contraception, homosexuality, abortion, IVF, and related. And that’s been going on for ~50 years now, so I assert the rampant heresies of our time are clustered around Church teaching on those matters.

[mr_toad]

> 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.

[rrr_oh_man]

> early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them

I don't think this has changed.

[ricudis]

Monogamy and rules about adultery is just about keeping a lineage clearly identifiable and unambiguous, mostly for property / inheritance reasons.

[conorjh]

humans 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