The Church encouraged it so that the last catch on a Friday wouldn't spoil over the Sabbath. It was more out of practically than dogma from the scriptures.
Just the same as why pork has been discouraged from consumption in the middle East; it was incredibly hard to preserve it and stop it from making people ill.
Trichinosis in pork went away with tuberculosis etc 60 years ago. Today you find it only in a family-raised pig that is fed garbage (table scraps etc). Its not in any commercially-raised hog.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-015-9083-2
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-ate-pork-mi...
The religious dietary restrictions or pork prohibition of Kosher/Halal came later.
(edit: just remembered this) Some of the workers on the pyramids ate pork as well. https://www.livescience.com/28961-ancient-giza-pyramid-build...
Labeling pork 'unclean' is just standard operating procedure where arbitrary restrictions are introduced to generate an "us vs. them" divide and give the religious authorities more control over the everyday lifes of the believers.
Same dynamics as when religions take great interest in the sexual lives of the belivers
Going on how your comment has been rendered invisible, looks like you triggered someone :]
Do you really think that humans need religions to forbid something that was known to be harmful for hundreds of thousands of years?
Sushi on the other hand usually contains raw fish indeed, which is why it should only be eaten fresh.
As for cooking beef, there’s certainly a reason why our ancestors invented cooking. It helps with making food more palatable and safer to eat. When heating tissue above roughly 42 degrees centigrade proteins start to denature, which renders many pathogens inactive and harmless.
The gastrointestinal system of modern humans can’t stomach many types of foods raw either because we lack the enzymes to digest them.
So perhaps not perfectly safe?
On the other hand, there are dishes like steak tartare, which, if not eaten too frequently, probably and usually won't cause any harm.
Absolutely - and this is exactly my point, everyone knows this. There is no point in gods telling humans what not to eat because humans know this already, known this for millennia. Religious prohibitions on food have nothing to do with "health and safety" and everything to do with manipulation and control,
Still, with home-raised pigs you have to be careful.
>Unlike many other forms of livestock, pigs are omnivorous scavengers, eating virtually anything they come across, including carrion and refuse.
Hence tapeworms and why people don't order their pork chops rare.
Yet we do eat beef rare.