I presume you know nothing about islam, but pigs are off the table (and kitchen) without exception. I don't think there is a way to buy it there, same as beef in India for example (even pork I never saw on any menu some 15 years ago when spending 6 months backpacking there, and I saw literally 1 pig altogether in those 6 months).
From how I understand it, pigs became taboo because they are a common disease vector. There's nothing fundamentally different between pigs, horses, and cows/bulls which would otherwise motivate banning one over the other. One could apply the same thing to cows in India, where the benefits of keeping cows (milk, dung, labor) outweigh the benefits of slaughtering them for food while also being more sustainable.
Yes, since there’s nothing more powerful than religious belief, how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing? By codifying it as an iron-clad zero-tolerance word-of-god holy decree, so much so that adherents aren’t even cognisant of the mechanism at play.
> how do you teach a population to avoid doing a particular risky thing?
Why should health risk vectors be framed as religious prohibitions? Shouldn't accumulated observations and common sense, developed since the early Iron Age, be sufficient?
For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
What's the reason for all their other rules? People fixate on pork because that's the one rule which seems to have a rational basis, but the Jewish religion (and others) have tons of rules which are much wackier. What's the basis for their rule banning the mixing of wool with linen, but permitting either or by themselves?
Probably it was some ancient schizo that got his harebrained nonsense written down, or it was just a power flex over adherents as cults do, or some mix of the two. Assuming that these religious rules must have an underlying rational basis is foolish. Given the context of the pork rule, being surrounded by hundreds of completely wacky rules, it seems most likely to me that the pork rule was completely arbitrary and turned out to be "correct" by accident.
It's currently unknown where the prohibition came from. It seems to have appeared during the finalization of the Torah sometime between the second and fifth centuries BCE. Pigs were widely grown and eaten in that period.
> For example, in Judaism, the prohibition of pork consumption [1] is completely unrelated to health risks. Alternatively, are Christians immune to Brucellosis?
Possibly at much lower risk. It appears that this particular dangerous form of brucellosis is not even distributed across regions and this case seems to related to feral rather than farmed pork.
The Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean at the time did eat pork, presumably without a high disease risk, so I would guess the risk was lower in the populations and places from which non-Jewish early Christians came.
Not an epidemiologist and will deffer to you on brucellosis distribution.
From religious perspective, the prohibition was lifted by divine decree somewhere in the 1st century (since Peter, first-century Jew living in Judea, is mentioned). Reported in Acts 10:
... Peter went up on the roof to pray.
10 He became hungry and wanted something to eat, but while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance.
11 He saw heaven open and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners.
12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals and reptiles of the earth, as well as birds of the air.
13 Then a voice said to him: “Get up, Peter, kill and eat!”
14 “No, Lord!” Peter answered. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”
15 The voice spoke to him a second time: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
Well, this divine decree isn’t talking about food. It’s actually a metaphor for Christianity opening its doors to Gentile converts instead of just Jews. This is how Peter himself interpreted it:
27 As Peter talked with him, he went inside and found many people gathered together.
28 He said to them, “You know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with a foreigner or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.
29 So when I was invited, I came without objection. I ask, then, why have you sent for me?”
…
34 Then Peter began to speak: “I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism,
35 but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and do what is right.
36 He has sent this message to the people of Israel, proclaiming the gospel of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all.”
A better passage would be Mark 9:17, which explicitly talks about food:
14 Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this.
15 Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
17 After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable.
18 “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them?
19 For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.)
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them.
21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder,
That explains why such rules are beneficial, but does not explain how such rules should come about.
They date back thousands of years when no one knew the mechanisms so its not deliberate. It could be evolution of cultures - in that groups that followed certain rules survived better.
The first problem I see with that is that the two main religions that ban pork also have a lot of other rules about food, dress and grooming, sexual behaviour, and lots of other things. SOme of them (hygiene rules, for example) are beneficial, but how do you explain the rest. SOme might have less obvious benefits in the context of the society they originated in - but all?
The other is that you do not need rules to be religious. Social norms are just as powerful. The persistence of circumcision in the US illustrates this. It is still common (usual?) despite the largest religion not only not requiring, but its scriptures specifically state it is not a religious requirement (and dispenses with the entire set of detailed rules - retaining only some more general ones).
You’re being rather spiteful and conceited with your hindsight. For all intents and purposes, the risk to people in the past of losing anyone to some disease they didn’t even know existed, which was not only disabling but also drained resources and energy from the whole group, would have simply not allowed “non-iron-clad” rules that could have led to the total destruction of the tribe/group.
Those religious iron-clad decrees could very well be the only reason any of us exist at all, because it allowed people to not just forget, e.g., that time when the tribe ate a big pig feast and 99% of the tribe died.
I would say that these kinds of religious edicts discourage investigation and development. The authority to elaborate on dietary taboos is then an expert on an ancient language, (trying to tell if an animal is “cloven hoof” by a murky description) rather than a scientist. Any God not spiteful nor conceited would want us to learn how to boil water; to learn by using thought.
Except pigs have a lot more in common with humans than the others.
Pigs are super intelligent, we have the same blood groups, organ compatibility, piglets smell like newborn babies, their skin is very similar to human skin.
Horses and cows have much better-smelling poop than hogs do, and they generally won't eat human poop, rotting garbage, fallen soldiers on battlefields, or small children that happen to trip and fall. Hogs will eat all of these.
Actually, there are a number of ways in which pigs and humans share physiology which makes us susceptible to shared disease vectors. Perhaps most obvious is our skin. Pigs and humans are the only land mammals who have what amounts to sea mammal skin, leathery and thick with fat deposits right at the dermis.
