I have read that pork is forbidden because the pig chews it's cud, therefore is considered unclean.

Ok, point taken. However, in times when sanitation is not what is now, such as Israel in the time of the Old Testament. it would have been. And while I won't argue with you on this point, as I don't have any real background in this area, I will say that I have been to parts of America, particularly deep in Appalachia, where the sanitation and the keep of farm animals was not at its best. There was no way I was going to eat the meat that they served there no matter how much they cooked it.

In general, I couldn't care what a person eats. So long it isn't me!

Then you would probably miss out on some good bar B que!

seriously, beef and chicken and tons of food permitted to the Jews also carry parasites. Pork was a problem in the US for a while, water is in other places. Why doesn't the bible ban water, if it carries parasites?

It was the most common domesticated livestock for the region. That's all.

And the bible doesn't say no 'raw' pork, just no pork. And no blood.

If you ask an Orthodox rabbi today why it's forbidden for Jews to eat pork, he'll tell you eating pork contaminates the blood with the spirit of pork (that is, making a pig out of the eater) and prevents the spirit from receiving the divine light when studying the Torah. When once I failed to understand a passage in the Talmud, the rabbi asked me if I had eaten pork recently. It is a given among them that all taref (unkosher) food extinguishes the divine spirit of the Jew.

For export only, presumably. Have you any idea how difficult it is being a Wall's Pork Sausage salesman in these parts?

Boro Nut

"Because of modern feeding practices, trichinosis is a no longer a concern"

Copyright 2000 © National Pork Producers Council


The implication here is that 3000 years ago this was a problem with pork.

As far as cooked/uncooked is concerned, I doubt that cooking meat was the general rule of thumb 5000- 10000 years ago. Back then one could eat the meat of a freshly killed deer while skinning it. If you tried that with a freshly killed pig you probably would get sick. As I stated in an earlier post, these are the kinds of incidents that led to folklore about what was and what was not healthy. Later this folklore became religious doctrine.

One big problem with ecco's theory: why would pork be forbidden by some and not others? Why were pigs ever domesticated if eating pork makes people sick? Especially when their principal useful feature is their meat -- pigs are not generally milked or used as beasts of burden or kept as pets.

What he said. I think the trichinosis idea won't hold. Anybody who noticed you got sick from eating pig meat would also notice that if cooked it was not a problem.

Pigs were popular all over the Asian landmass. The earliest surviving pork recipe is Chinese, and the earliest domestication of pigs seems to have occurred quite early, before people were eating grain.

Michael

I heard that in some ancient Near East religions (long before the birth of Judaism) the pig was considered holy or divine and so was not to be eaten, similar to the concept of cows in Hinduism. Eventually, the idea of no pig-eating was passed onto Judaism and Islam as a remnant of these past pagan beliefs. I don't know how much validity this theory has. I don't even remember where I read it from.

I also heard that pork fat doesn't get digested properly in humans, and so there would be chunks of pork fat embedded in our human fat. Again, just something I've read--don't know how valid it is.

I've never heard of Middle Eastern pig sacredness.

As to pork fat not getting digested properly, it will pass right through and *not* get stuck in our body fat.