Except that might not be the reason why it's forbidden : https://youtu.be/pI0ZUhBvIx4

Anything to do with eating any meat can be dangerous.

We don't know why religions banned certain meat. Anthropologists etc give us post facto rationalisations, and, to my mind, even the holy books might be retrospective excuses.

There are two main reasons why religious books of law ban certain behaviors:

- to encode social and higienic rules as understood at the time

- to signal heressy, prohibiting a common practice carried out by heretics (double points if it is a practice central to those heretical beliefs).

For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled.

> For religions originating in the desert where meat spoils quickly, it makes sense to ban those kinds of meat more prone to transmiting deseases if mishandled

Is pork any more prone to spoilage, or spoilage-related health risks, than other meats?

My understanding is that the health risks from pork relate mainly to the transmission of disease and parasites in undercooked pork, not spoilage.

Re:spoilage Even if there's nothing specific to pork, the size of the animal may present that challenge. it's harder to time the slaughter and butchery if a larger animal. If you've been raising an animal for a year, you're going to want to eat all the meat. So you need to save it for celebrations, or barter, or eat meat that's been sitting around. Pigs are pretty big, assuming all domesticated animals have increased in size roughly equally.

But the kosher prohibition isn't "don't eat meat slaughtered a week ago", which would be easy, it's about cloven hooves.

The other hypothesis I've seen put out there is that viruses tend to have an easy time jumping from (living) pigs to humans. We think of the flu as relatively minor now but without clean water it would be a big deal.

fwiw, turning on your spellchecker would enhance your comments greatly.

Thanks for the advice. I try to have it enabled in all edit tools and browsers, but some will not allow it in two languages at the same time, and setting it in mobile to a language other than the main OS language is not trivial. And I haven't found how to enable spell check on Firefox mobile.

So certain. I guess you were there...

We have lots of written history that validates his generalization and zero reason to believe that peoples who's records did not survive would have done those same things for different reasons.

Chicken is less dangerous than pork.

I am not going to get involved in a religious argument, but I didn't mention it was the only reason, I said it was one of the reasons.

This simply isn’t true. From a health as well as safety standpoint, chicken correlates with worth health outcomes and definitely leads to more illnesses.

The salmonella you get from undercooked chicken is less dangerous than the parasites in under cooked pork.

The difference is that almost all chicken is contaminated while very little pork is.

If we compare contaminated meat, okay, maybe pork is more dangerous. If we compare what people actually encounter, pork appears much less dangerous.

Relative to pork? Source.

pork was dangerous when it was used as a garbage under houses. not when its raised with nowadays norms

No, even modern farm raised pork is dangerous to eat undercooked.

Weirdly chicken is dangerous to eat undercooked or raw, but there aren't as many cultural taboos against it.

Were chickens present in the cultures 2000 years ago when the taboos developed? Honest question.

Yes, they were. Chickens are one of the oldest domesticated species by humans.

Because it's not as dangerous as eating raw pork. Relatively speaking, raw pork is much more dangerous.

The data doesn’t back this up though. More people get sick from chicken.

We are not talking about quantity, we are talking about severity. Plus, you can't use modern data for this because modern stock raising methods mitigate a lot of the dangers from pork.

The parasites from undercooked pork can be very dangerous.

Why wouldn’t we use modern data? We’re not living in the past.

Are you talking about trichinosis? I can see that being more problematic than salmonella in historical contexts, but again, it’s highly treatable today and rarely fatal if it isn’t treated.

Am I missing some other kind of infection?

Edit: Now I see it, you were referring to the past in the parent comment. I’ve confused this thread for another - sorry about that!