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Comment by weberer | Hacker News Reader

>my intuition here was way off. I expected insects to pose far fewer risks from parasites to humans.

Weird, my intuition was the exact opposite. The thought of eating bugs triggers a disgust reaction, similar to the thought of eating crap. Humans developed those reactions over hundreds of generations for a reason.

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My gut reaction to the smell of pork, bacon or any meat derived from pig is disgust.

That doesn't mean this feeling is some kind of natural primal intuition, it just means I didn't grow up eating it.

Actually, pork meat can be really dangerous!! That's also another reason why some religions ban it's consumption.

Nowadays, we learned enough to overcome the dangers of pork but that's a result of modern society.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Relative to pork? Source.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6710a1.htm

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

I'm intrigued that you can recognize fried or minced pork by smell and distinguish it from beef or poultry by smell alone.

I know a lot of people have an aversion to mutton as it can have a very gamey aroma to it, but I wasn't aware people perceive pork as similarly intense.

My wife has a powerful sense of smell, and she vociferously complains about the odor of pork, which smells no different to me than any other meat.

They smell very distinct to me as well. Just as they taste much different, they smell different in similar ways to me.

I think turkey, duck, and chicken are distinct while cooking as well. I’d have a hard time distinguishing gamey meats, though. I couldn’t tell you if it’s venison or moose, for example.

Any pig meat has a very very distinct smell to me.

I can also recognise cooked poultry vs beef by smell (more so when raw, but when cooked I'm sure I can figure it out as well).

I thought most people could.

A disgust of eating insects is not universal in all cultures.

Its instinctual, not cultural. I'm going to guess you're referring to hunter-gatherer societies that frequently have to overcome famine and eat bugs out of desperation.

There will always be some cultures that are different from the norm. 100% uniformity in human culture is very rare.

But look across the globe: I would posit that a large percentage of humans have a taboo against insect consumption.

If there are any counter examples that you can state from the world one must analyze how numerically large that community is within that country and the world.

In other words, don't count the number of cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption, count the population of the cultures/communities that are OK with insect consumption.

I don't think taboos are in anyway useful in determining health implications. For example, are dogs or horses in any way materially worse than cows or sheep for people to eat? Why are the French happy to eat frogs and snails?

I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.

Human societies have developed over the years with trial and error. Taboos against a food can have a positive correlation with negative health outcomes when consuming that food.

So just because there is a taboo against a food group does not mean that it will definitely be bad for you. There is just a positive probability that it could be.

Taboos can also arise out of fashion and economics, irrational beliefs and moral considerations of a particular culture.

So when we see a Taboo, it is often good to analyze: could this taboo have arisen due to health issues (here pork is a good example because of the danger of tapeworm infection) ? Or could the Taboo have arisen out of cultural reasons e.g dogs/horses are beloved in many cultures so a taboo may have evolved that we shouldn't kill them.

> I'm reasonably certain the idea of certain food being taboo is almost completely due to cultural norms.

TL;DR: Sometimes it due to cultural norms and sometimes its due to negative health outcomes that get noticed due to trial and error over generations.

That’s more ethics than disgust. If you synthesised a dog/horse steak. I’d, try it. If you synthesised a bug, I still wouldn’t want it.

Dogs and horses are not ruminants, therefore they are more likely to carry parasites that are harmful to humans. Cows and sheep are both ruminants. So yes, there is a difference beyond cultural preferences. Or I should say, cultural preferences are not just arbitrary.

Pigs and chickens are also not ruminants and are eaten almost as widely as cows and sheep.

Not by me (I grew up on a farm), but you do you.

Yes, it was overcome in places where abject famine made it a necessity for survival.

A lot of cultures also have much higher rates of parasitical infestation because they are too poor (or have been historically) to avoid it.

We have a somewhat similar reaction to eating brains for instance, yet that’s probably one of the safer part or the animals we eat.

I think a lot of the reactions we built over hundreds of generations need to be revised in the world we are in today, and in light of what we know now. One of the interesting one is our reaction to body sizes, and how we still have an instinctive reaction to tall people, when it makes no sense in most of the societies we live in.

Prion transmitted diseases similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease seem to be not that rare in nature. You need to cook the brains extremely well and long to be on the safe side.

Thankfully BSE (Mad Cow Disease) was not as transmissible as feared.

Prions are proteins and need to be denatured to be rendered harmless. Cooking is generally not enough to achieve this. See WHO guidelines for prion sterilization as mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#Sterilization.

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