Ask Lemmy

Wrong, it could be based on plenty of solid, evidence based objectives and cultural materialisms that sadly might be lost to time, atleast from the context of these religions.

Some armchair historians have theorised that sweating remove toxins from the body and pigs that dont sweat very well might be bad to eat because of toxin accumulation in their bodies, but this has been debunked some time ago. Toxins don't accumulate to significant levels, neither does sweating remove them in any meaningful manner.

The strongest indicator is that this idea that pigs = dirty comes from abrahamic religions that all developed in the middle east and the levant - arid, inhospitable regions with precious water sources.

Also important to note is that this idea also did NOT originate independently in other regions where water and the vegetative life it spawns, was more plentiful.

There are some valid concerns when raising pigs in arid climates:

• Food hygiene: Meat, especially non-lean meat, spoils quickly in hotter climates. Further pigs eat anything including garbage, waste, and carrion meat, spoiled or otherwise, meaning higher chance of parasite/ disease transmission.

plenty of people ate pork and didnt have any noticeable setback Yeah, but if enough people from your village puke+shits themselves to death every once in a while after eating pork, and you can't find any other valid reason, you might just blame the pork.

• Shitty sweat glands: Pigs have very ineffective sweat glands that are really shitty at keeping them cool. Instead, pigs cool themselves down by wallowing in water or mud. In a desert setting were water and mud are rare if at all available, pigs tend to get very hot and resort to wallowing whatever is closely available - which as it turns out, especially in an animal pen, is pigshit.

• Food economy: Pigs are both omnivorous and need more water and shelter than other desert livestock like goats or sheep - desert animals survive on less water, and have fur coats that protect them from the harsh sun. In a place where resource conservation was a necessity, it is costlier and harder to raise pigs and the returns from them was consequently less.

• Symbolic: Okay this is not a very strong evidence based approach but people watching pigs eat their own shit and wallow in them makes people not want to associate with it.

Now in regions with ample rainfall and forests, keeping pigs is easy. Just stay near a river or pond and you're good. Pigs are even capable of foraging for food in forests themselves, though a pig farmer that lets his pigs do that will lose a bunch to wild animals and other people. Pigs are efficient converters of food into meat, and they can pretty much eat human leftovers and byproducts that come from farming, which you were doing anyway.

Take for example Europe and China: Both have had pigs as cornerstones in their diets. Europe survived winter months with preserved pig products like hams and sausages. In China, pigs are even more important. It's practically unavoidable and their cuisine reflects that.

Now one might raise a relevant question: If abrahamic religions, due to their locations of origin, hates pork, why doesn't Christianity, an abrahamic religion, place as much focus on avoiding it? I can't be sure of the answer to this one; Jesus in the new testament does say that every animal under the sun is game for food: the old testament does prohibit pig as food, but the new testament overwrites the old. My best bet is that Christianity, with it's apostles travelling all over the world, spread into and flourished in non-arid regions - and given that the new testament removed the restriction on pork, it also flourished as a food source under it.