Certainly, some religions forbid eating pork, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’ve met many non-religious folks in my life who won’t eat pork for reasons that all essentially suggest that pork is somehow dirtier than other meats. I’m sure that Jules’ quote in Pulp Fiction didn’t help the pork industry but I’m pretty sure this was a common belief well before that.
- Trichinosis, which was more prevalent in carnivores and omnivores (pigs) than herbivores (cows and sheep).
- Cows and sheep ate grass while pigs were fed scraps; that is, edible garbage.
Trichinosis (which is pretty rare these days) can lead to some pretty grim complications neruocysticercosis
Could be, though it’s no longer relevant in the developed world.
Trichinosis is a disease caused by eating meat infected with a parasite potentially carried by pigs. Which is why traditionally, raw pork has been treated as extra-dangerous, compared to raw beef, for instance.
Nowadays in the U.S. and most of the developed world, it’s been eliminated from commercially-raised pork, so eat all the raw pork you want. Still an issue in less-developed areas, though.
[ETA: darn pork ninjas!]
Probably more so the fact that pigs will enthusiastically eat feces, human and otherwise. Dogs may be considered unclean for the same reason.
When my brother returned to the US after living in Germany for a few years, he introduced me to Mett, a dish made from raw pork. It is delicious!
But be cautious of raw pastured pork – the pig much more likely to have come across a source of infection than factory-raised pork is. While trichinosis is extremely rare in the us, apparently there’s been a small uptick in recent years due to the increase in more naturally-raised pork. For a while, pretty much all the cases in the US were traced to hunted bear meat. I don’t think that’s true any more.
general info and links
look closely at figure 5 to see that trichinoisis from pork was at its lowest between 2002 and 2007, but remains very low in the US
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6401a1.htm
detailed info on trichinosis and how various developed countries deal with it, and what cooking temps kill it. (the pork doesn’t have to get very hot, but it has to get that hot everywhere.)
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/trichinae/docs/fact_sheet.htm
Muslims often consider dogs as “unclean” for this reason and shun them today (well…I guess it is complex with Muslims and dogs are certainly used in their society but that feeling still persists with many).
then are rabbits, guinea pigs, and other coprophages unclean as well?
I’ve heard the theory that the real underlying reason for the widespread opposition to pork is ecological. Pigs (and dogs) are, as several people have noted, omnivorous. They essentially will eat the same food as people eat. So they’re competition for food resources.
So while pork is tasty it’s a bad deal for your society if people are raising pigs. So societies develop a belief that eating pork is forbidden. They stop raising pigs and people have more food to eat.
A social aversion to pigs and dogs causes societies to give up the short-term advantages of having these animals around in order to gain the long-term advantages of their absence.
Rabbits and guinea pigs aren’t precisely coprophages: Their pellets aren’t the same thing as hraka. They have to pass food through their digestive system twice to fully digest it, and the stuff that’s passed through once isn’t the same as what’s passed through twice.
I came in to say this. But Little Nemo said it first, and probably better.
So now I’m posting just to back him up.
And to add that in a relatively arid place like much of the Middle East, where food doesn’t necessarily grow in abundance, it can be a particular issue to have an animal competing with you for food resources.
Europe and China have spent several thousand years raising pigs. Europe dominated the world in recent centuries. China has dominated east Asia for several millennia. This makes me a bit skeptical of that theory.
The traditional Jewish and Muslim meat animals are long-legged herd animals. When they eat up all of the grass, you move the herd to the next valley (along with your entire tribe) in search of fresh pastures.
Pigs have short legs, and less herd instinct. To raise pigs, you build a fence around them and bring food to them. Which, to a nomadic shepherd, must have seemed utterly insane.
Another theory I have read, is that cultures use food preferences and taboos as markers of tribal allegiance, to distinguish Us versus Them. “You don’t want to date one of Their daughters. Have you seen what They eat? Ick!”
Ninja mock turtles? 
Still ain’t kosher.
The trichinella spiralis can be destroyed by cooking. Unfortunately, back in the old days, meat was cooked by fire which singed the outside but left the meat rare on the inside with the organism intact.
Our neighbor’s have a farm market. Produce has a limited shelf life, so they were always composting food. They began raising a few pigs each year, so all that food is no longer wasted. Win-win.
That’s just way too broad a statement to apply to all, or even most, human societies/locations.
For instance, if you’ve got a few hundred acres of oak forest, you’ll probably get more nutrition by running pigs through it and eating the acorn-fed ham, than you would by processing the acorns into a human-edible product, after accounting for the effort of processing the acorns versus the effort of herding the pigs.
Or, if you can take all the out-of-date leftovers and scraps from Los Vegas buffets and feed it to pigs, you’re getting a lot of edible food out of what was inedible waste.
On the other hand, if you’re feeding pigs on high-quality bulk soybeans and grain, that’s a net loss of nutrition.
So, depending on the society’s technology and location, raising pigs could be a big net loss or big net gain.
I think this was it. You’d feed the pigs the slop humans would not eat. The trimmings from vegetables and other meat and whatnot. Pig turns this otherwise inedible (or very undesirable) stuff into meat you can eat.
As for dogs you can feed them scraps you would not eat as well but even if the dog was consuming nutrition you could otherwise consume it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Dogs as pets is a somewhat recent societal thing and one we can do because food is cheap and abundant. Back in the old days dogs worked for their food and earned their calories in a variety of ways. The cost of keeping them was outweighed by the services they provided.
Of course, most of that waste from Las Vegas is still perfectly human-edible. It’s just that some small fraction of it is contaminated enough to make a small fraction of people sick, and we consider the rest of it gross. If we were pressed for food, though, our standards for that would change quickly.
There was an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike visited a pig farmer in Vegas who did this.