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Supposedly, many Galveston residents avoided eating fish and crabs for several years after the 1900 storm, because so many bodies were buried at sea (and some washed up on shore).
Pork-eating prohibitions made sense back when trichinosis was rampant, but as noted, it’s pretty much a non-issue in the U.S. now. I still insist on well-cooked pork like the excellent carnitas I had tonight.
One of the pugilistic Brit atheists—Dawkins or Hitchens—postulated that the similarity in flavor of pork and human was at least in part a factor in the prohibition.
It’s that in the Middle East, although the Fertile Crescent was fine for raising crops of grain, it lacked the forests where pigs could forage their own food. In forested areas, pigs living off the products of forest trees fed themselves for free and their meat was all profit. Without the forests, pig fodder was a drain on human food resources.
So why did other Middle Easterners raise pigs?
I think that the simplest explanation is just that it was a tribal marker, a way to distinguish between Us and Them.
They tasted good.
Also, the Fertile Crescent used to get more precipitation and way, way back had forests and more resources. Back then, pigs were more profit and less deficit. As the climate became drier and humans more numerous (and humans did things like cut down the famous Cedars of Lebanon) there were fewer resources to go around. Pigs became more deficit and less profit.
And that was also probably a factor, but a tribe that had few resources to give to pigs, or lived a lifestyle that made keeping them difficult, might also be more inclined to give them up entirely.
I find this somewhat unconvincing…
In Spain and leaving the religious aspects aside, for a long time the biggest differences were regional. If you were in the wettest northern areas, you got enough grass to raise cows in relatively small farms. Start moving south, you move to sheep as the main herding animal, with herds of both sheep and cows needing to become mobile (that is, you need much larger farms and/or multiple grazing areas you can rotate). Go to the driest parts and say “thank God for pigs”.
I guess in general it has more fat than say leaner meat such as chicken or turkey. I definitely have this preconception that it is much more unhealthy than other meats as well. I don’t know where I got this from or whether or not it is true
Remember when these taboos came about, “unhealthy” meant starving. You didn’t have obese people needing to cut out fat or count carbs.
Well, none of those are Kosher. They neither have cloven hooves nor chew the cud. The Hebrew food laws make no mention of shit eating.
They may have traded meat and other goods for grain. There were markets back then.
Before the Egyptian captivity (if you’re going by the Bible) the Hebrews didn’t worry about matzoh, and I’m not sure a lot of time was spent writing down what was being eaten. That was probably the biggest nomadic period of the group.
The first matzoh was, according to legend, the last of the bread the baked in Egypt before leaving, and by assumption the grain would have come from the agricultural fields along the Nile. Then the next 40 years it was manna from heaven. Then… well, matzoh is only required ritually once a year, it wouldn’t be that hard to trade for it.
The production of bread for the Sabbath, though, that’s where a big chunk of the annual grain harvest would go. While there continued to be animal herders, after the Exodus period the Hebrews had substantial settlements, cities, etc. where presumably a lot of grain was raised.
There are specific prayers in Hebrew for entire food categories, a blessing specific before:
[ul]
[li]bread[/li][li]grains[/li][li]wine and/or grape juice[/li][li]fruit[/li][li]vegetables[/li][li]anything not covered by the above[/li][/ul]
Looking at that list, not only would I expect such a culture to use and value all sorts of grain highly, the fact there is a specific blessing for such a specific category as “bread” when most of the rest of them are pretty general (the other very specific one is for wine/grape juice) would lead me to think that grain production, as well as bread production, is pretty darn important. And if they aren’t producing grain/flour/bread they are going to put a high priority on obtaining it somehow.
Based on archaeological evidence - which concerns the Canaanite lands in general, from which the Hebrews are thought to have originated - most of the territory was small farming towns and tranhumance nomadism which, as part of the annual cycle, grazed animals on crop stubble and thereby allowed nomadic herding and agriculture to overlap. In good times the area was a net exporter of agricultural products so it probably wouldn’t be a big problem for the nomadic part of the population to trade for grain, and that would be assuming a sharp separation between the two groups which is not always the case.
To his dying day, the only way my father would not eat a pork chop unless it was burned almost to a crisp. He would not eat sausage unless he cooked it himself. Ham was okay, because it had been cured. The only thing I can think of that would trigger that kind of reaction was if he actually knew someone with trichinosis when he was a kid.
Most of the ancient Kosher laws strike me as, A) Priests scamming free meals via the sacrificial system, and B) Some old dude with OCD making the rules. “The peas shalt not touch the mashed potatoes. That is abomination.”