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Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

Larger animals can be inspected individually to find pathogens or diseases.

Insects are so small that it's practically impossible to inspect each individual organism. You can do sampling of the batch, but the odds of missing bad ones are still high.

Same with the fruits and vegetables, some are easy to inspect, others are almost impossible, or impossible to clean. There are kosher (insect-free) versions of lettuce and some berries which are much more expensive than non-kosher ones.

Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system. Religious dietary laws and cultural taboos are probably partly developed from disgust, and partly from trial-and-error.

View on HN

> Lastly, disgust is a part of the human immune system.

This is the most important bit.

Too many "rationalists" who otherwise preach evolution all the time forget to notice that our sense of disgust is also evolved just like everything about us for the purpose of survival and reproduction and is not just some annoying irrational quirk that gets in the way of doing the right thing.

I thought the generally accepted science was that humans can learn disgust reactions socially, so that they are more adaptable on a non-evolutionary timescale.

> The disgust system is a psychological mechanism for producing pathogen avoidant behaviour [10–12]. In previous work, we have stressed the universality of disgust, showing that there is much that is similar about disgust responses between animals and humans, between humans and over historical time [11,13]. However, there is also much that differs between individuals and between social groups. In this paper, we look at disgust and disease avoidance behaviour in human individuals and in human social groups as an adaptive system. Natural selection has produced a solution to the problem of hard-to-detect parasites by designing a system that is sensitive to local information about infection risk. This system responds to parasite pressure not just over evolutionary time, but over lifetimes, using what cues it can. This may be information about an individual's current state, its history of sickness and exposure to disgusting experiences, or what it has learnt from the local culture and from the hygiene practices of others.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3013466/

I know a bunch of people who have gone off specific foods after being coincidentally sick and associating the two things.

There's a strong cultural component when it comes to disgust. People in many parts of the world eat insects regularly as a part of their standard diets. In the US, most people don't think of honey or lobster (aquatic arthropod) or carmine (red food coloring) as "insect food" but these items most definitely fit in that category and are commonly consumed.

In the past, people in the west found yogurt, sushi, and lobsters absolutely disgusting. Now many will happily eat those foods, and even consider them delicacies.

Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.

> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.

Curious if you've got a source for that, because I've lived with 3 infants and every one of them was delighted by the squishiness of poop and needed to be taught that disgust response.

Those same populations have much higher parasitic infections as well. That's the whole point of the study on which we are commenting.

The greyness of your comment possibly indicates it has been deemed bigoted. It's relevant regardless. The subject of human parasitology certainly shows geographic and cultural distributions. One example is a strange case of neurocysticercosis, perhaps the most common cause of epilepsy and result of taenia solium or pork tapeworm. The case I recall involved a Jewish family, all infected and symptomatic. Doctors had difficulty discovering the source due to both assumed rarity of the disease and the preclusion of pork in a kosher diet. The eureka was the servant, who did not practice a kosher diet. Because this worm can lay 80k eggs per day, all of which are small and sticky, they tend to accumulate under fingernails, presumably as a result of grooming and outlier of hygiene. There are numerous parasites that are either or both geographically and culturally concentrated. In the US, neurocysticercosis is most common in California. According to sources not my own, this is due to the larger population of individuals who come from areas where swine handling is more common, along with certain mitigation practices or lack thereof. The French have a higher rate of toxoplasmosis, possibly due to, eg steak tartare. There are many examples.

Look at a map of countries that eat insects. Compare it to a map of per capita parasitic infections.

The study above indicates that this is not just a correlation.

> Some disgust reactions are hard-wired (e.g. reactions to fecal matter or vomit), and others are culturally learned.

Others are learned by experience. I used to like peppermint a lot, until one day in uni I poisoned myself by drinking half a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Ever since then, for many years, the smell of peppermint makes me dry heave and physically gag uncontrollably. I cannot tolerate peppermint at all, something in my brain 'learned' that peppermint is a poison and won't tolerate it.

How does this invalidate the point?

The people who are using their brain to override their disgust system are probably doing something that's extremely maladaptive.

It literally says that what we evolved was a system that can learn that something is bad via society like eating dogs and horses vs eating pigs and cows. The pig eaters and the dog eaters aren't overriding anything, because they didn't learn it in the first place.

It invalidates it because you're saying disgust is evolutionary. The response is saying it's largely cultural, thus something that triggers disgust is not going against some "evolutionary truth" but is rather just another learned behavior.

If it's purely cultural and has no connection to reality then it should have "evolevd out" of us. But it hasn't. Being influenced by culture is part of how the system works. The reason you learn disgust is you can't afford to learn by trial and error so you outsource to society.

Now if you think you're a smart ass and decide to "override" the cultural "indoctrination" that makes you find insects disgusting, what do you think is the likelihood that you are the one who is right?

In all likelihood you will find out after some time that you made a huge irreversible mistake.

Social transmission is an evolved trait that is beneficial, and transmitted disgust that prevents disease spread is absolutely one reason it might be beneficial.

I didn't eat scrambled eggs for ten years or so after once choking on a forkful when I was around seven years old because I found them absolutely disgusting.

It's still not economical to test e.g. every single pig for roundworms, especially since they do not create clinical symptoms in these hosts and a direct test is rather expensive. But they can pose a significant risk to humans who eat undercooked pork and in the past about 5 percent of Americans were estimated to be infected at any given time. This has only gone down thanks to modern production standards that eliminate or drastically reduce exposure to wild animals that may transmit the disease. Compared to farm animals it's actually pretty easy to contain insects in an environment where they can't get infected with foreign pathogens, since people don't really care about freely roaming larvae.

I've read a medical research paper about the resurgence of some nasty parasitic disease in Israel with the breakdown by religious community[1]. Turns what? The stricter the dietary laws for the community were - the less infections occurred.

And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all.

[1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.

> they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.

Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.

I basically agree with that.

So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say.

And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews.

Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years.

In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.

If you think the Orthodox can dictate to non-Orthodox you haven’t spent much time in America.

Just a heads-up: You're responding to an ML language model, or possibly to a human giving their best GPT-3 impression.

> possibly to a human giving their best GPT-3 impression.

Also commonly accused of mental illness, you gotta look at both sides of the story.

I guess the reason people are like "no no no no!" is first, truth, second, not being afraid of being accused of bigotry--don't want to be bigoted, but also not willing to err on the side of not being accusable. Just being straight. Then, further you have the act of going through mental illness and coming out of it with a clean bill of health--unheard of. Afterward, hamming it up. I could if desired be totally neurotypical, without medication (I did hear one case of this), n I identified everything that was hosing me. F atoms especially.

But I love my poor beleaguered soul, it's been through so much, why change it?

Yeah, this model might require a little bit of tuning...

They don't, but they sympathize. And I did spend every second I could in America, absolutely every single second I could. The Non-Orthodox generally buffer the Orthodox strictures. Like demanding all lemonades they carry have the U in a circle symbol, kosher.

And no problem with that, I am unique in my ability to prove my pro-Semitism. I like Orthodox intolerance of, essentially, being poisoned. They take the heat for a lot of society's pure food and drugs.

I am offended by your unfounded preemptive censorship of facts.

There's the racial component as well.

For instance Spaniards (ethnic Visigoths) have near-total immunity to bad pork, whereas Jews (Jewish Diaspora, ethnic Jews) are very vulnerable.

Think of it this way: if there was a public service announcement by the early Jews, where would they write it down?

That's not racial immunity, it's probably an alcohol-induced "immunity" or resistance.

Visigoths probably drunk much more alcohol than Jews, which is a good disinfectant. In the old times it was even part of the soldier rations in some armies.

Some Visigoths converted to Islam and migrated to Morocco, but even after their conversion they still had a reputation of heavy drinkers.

For 10 years I was a pescetarian, until one time I tasted a beef carpaccio, and it was both edible and tasty (before that I wasn't even thinking about meat as a food). So I started eating raw meat dishes like steak tartar, but I always drunk a shot of something strong for safety, until one day I understood that it's unnecessary.

This sounds pretty absurd and I can't find anything on Google about native Spaniards having any kind of special immunity to "bad pork", specifically pork tapeworm or any of the other common pig parasites. So if you've got some links I'd love to read more.

Not bulletproof but it comes with the cultural norms around cooking pork. In combination the cultural norms and the immunity mean pork isn't forbidden like it was by Moses in the Bible. That was the equivalent of a public service announcement for the early Jews, there was nowhere to say "don't eat this it'll kill you" than in one of the books of Moses. That message couldn't be separate from the Bible, everything was conveyed in the Bible.

But like a Spaniard eating nearly raw pork doesn't die. Extrapolate for bad pork, he'll spit it out if it's bad.

And since when does your one-cent Google search trump my traveling to Spain in person?

I had thought that pork that was handled carelessly was just more prone to foodborne disease, and that happened to be the case at that time--not something genetic like lactose intolerance. It's pretty recent that Americans are even now okay with rare pork, and that's because improvements in preparation reduced the risk. For that matter, there's nothing all-that-magical about chicken that it can't be eaten raw in theory, it's just that salmonella is very very common.

could you elaborate the last sentence of this comment?

I'm afraid I don't see the connection between innate immunity and service anouncements or writing things down, but its probably me being thick even though I'd like to understand.

What do you mean immunity to bad pork?

Like eating pork that wasn't cooked very well, no problem. Or bad quality pork, perhaps.

In America it's irrelevant, the bacon is pre-cooked to high standards and comes from good sources. Partly because secular Jews eat that pork having no cultural norms around it, just driven by it being forbidden. They're vulnerable.

It's genetic, just like a certain tribe of Pacific Islander developed a partial immunity to prions, because they sometimes ate human central nervous system. It's genetic.

Survival of the fittest.

Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related; I always joke that shrimps are just under water bugs. Lots of people that are disgusted by one, enjoy eating the other. Disgust is mostly cultural and learned. Obviously, some of our gag reflexes are about detecting things that are bad. Like rotting meat or things that have gone off.

But then we ferment and rot lots of things intentionally and the products related to that are loved in some parts of the world and found disgusting in other parts of the world because they trigger the same reflexes as food that has gone off. E.g. a lot of Chinese people might not enjoy french cheeses and likewise the french might not appreciate some the fermented soybeans and eggs that are popular in China. And they eat snails, which with a lot of garlic and butter are actually not horrible but also not something everyone enjoys.

Anyway, if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that. Cleaning that is a percentage game. Likewise with organic produce you buy at the market. Small mites, spiders, etc. The occasional bigger bugs you might wash away. But a lot of smaller ones end up in your food. It's fine. We've evolved to be omnivores. Most of that meats with the acid in your stomach and gets broken down. Some of the parasites are a bit more nasty and actually can become an issue. Guess how those end up in your stomach. You eat/drink them.

Probably intensive farming of fish, ducks, chickens, or bugs does not result in the healthiest animals. Unhealthy animals get sick. Eating sick animals is risky. There are some signs that covid happened like that and there have been other examples of diseases spreading from animals to people via farmed animals traded in poultry markets or wherever.

> Insects and crustaceans (shrimps, lobsters, etc.) are closely related ...

One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans. Lobster sashimi is much safer than eating a raw crayfish from a river or lake. The latter can cause a serious lungs disease.

> if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.

I once found a caterpillar inside an eggplant ;)

> One important difference: salt-water animals (including crustaceans) harbor parasites which are less compatible with humans, for them humans are dead-end, they can't close the complex reproduction cycle. Land insects and fresh-water crustaceans (e.g. crayfish) are much more dangerous for humans.

Nice point. The flip side is that with land based insects the parasites can close the cycle with humans/mammals and hence insect consumption can be more risky.

(Parent comment) > if you eat fresh produce from your garden, there are likely to come some small critters along with that.

Eating food with the occasional insect that has gotten through (e.g in a vegetable or salad) will not be as risky as eating large amounts of insect mass. The probability of then getting a parasite or disease then will be much higher. Its just mathematics.

Why increase your risk probability?

> Why increase your risk probability?

this will always be the case. we can "survive" on a very safe diet

This is exactly why I don't eat shell fish. I have always thought they look like underwater bugs and the thought of eating them is revolting. I am fine with others eating whatever they want, and my wife eats them but its just not for me.

I think bivalves are usually considered shellfish and they just look like muscle. Except for oysters, which look like snot or something and I'm unsurprised when people don't want to eat that.

I recently learned that Rambam[1] advised against eating fruits, even though they're perfectly kosher. Turns out he noticed he noticed that people can get sick from fruits, but back in the day they weren't aware about harmful bacteria and the fact that you need to wash them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

Usually if you can peel the fruit the inside is considered כשר.

I was told to always split the apple into two halves, and check that there is no non-kosher meat inside;) Have no idea whether that's an actual kashrut requirement, or it was a joke.

Is that why there's no "trout sushi"? Because it is fresh water? (At least that's what the SEO results on Google all say.)

Salmonid species (salmon, trout, char, et al) carry nematode parasites that can infect humans. Before salmonid sushi can be eaten, at least in the US, it is required to be frozen, killing the nematodes. Large trout species like rainbow trout are sometimes served as sushi -- I imagine species size and susceptibility to freezing damage factor in too.

Other freshwater fish like sturgeon are also served as sushi.

Yes. Parasites that are dangerous to humans are much more prevalent in freshwater fish.

Religious laws like kosher and halal laws didn't develop from disgust. They engrained disgust to steer people away from contracting trichinosis. That was an exceedingly practical way of putting out a public health message prior to the advent of mass literacy.

When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork... so famously, my grandma who didn't speak English went into a butcher shop in Baltimore bought a bunch of bacon without understanding it was pig, and fed a piece of it raw to my father, who was a baby... and the butcher apparently shouted at her not to feed that raw to a kid. Which baffled her.

Equally baffling to me, I had a beer at the Munich Hofbrauhaus and watched a kid eat a pile of pork tartare.. which looked delicious.. but when I asked, he seemed shocked. He told me there's no trichinae in Europe now, and it's normal to eat raw pork in Germany..

The world comes at you fast, lol.

The truth is we don't know why and how they developed. I wrote about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507527

Similarly like only after living 7 years in Israel I discovered that "white meat" is an euphemism for pork.

Also the reality is much more complex. We tend to project our current understanding into the past. The reality of keeping Kashrut back then wasn't as we understand it today.

The lifestyle of Eastern European Jews from the beginning of the 20th century until World War II - between keeping the mitzvot and secularization [Hebrew]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfrFQH6RzZc

“ When my Jewish grandparents came from Ukraine to the US in the 1930s they'd never even considered or been presented with the possibility of eating pork”

I don’t understand how that could occur, since a great deal of pork is produced in Ukraine, both now and historically.

It may have been their first time in a non-Kosher butcher. Ukraine used to have very large Jewish enclaves.

Now my mind is wondering if insects could be a source and transmitter of prion diseases.

Perhaps the proteins in bugs don’t line up with humans though.

This might explain how wild deer develop prion diseases. My understanding is that they aren't eating the nervous tissues of other animals but perhaps an insect, parasite, or other lifeform is providing the infection.

Develop...maybe. CWD can stay dormant in soil for a long time (2+ years). https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/diseases/cwd/what-are-prio...

Deer getting CWD from the soil wouldn't be unprecedented. Sheep get anthrax that way. Animals that keep their head down eating stuff off the ground are particularly susceptible to soil-borne infections.

Deer will eat small animals.

Plants can transmit prions.

Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/

"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication

Roots and leaves were washed thoroughly and analyzed for the presence of PrPSc by serial PMCA (Morales et al., 2012). The results show that even highly diluted PrPSc can bind to roots and leaves and sustain PrPC conversion (Fig. 1A). [...] However, both roots and leaves capture PrPSc efficiently, even at very small concentrations, equivalent to those present in biological fluids, such as blood and urine (Chen et al., 2010).

Animals can be infected by oral ingestion of prion-contaminated plants

After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."

---

Something developed sporadic prion disease (in humans its called "Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29887134/ ), died from it, plants grew on the fertilized land and were eaten by deer, the cycle repeats.

CWD-infected deer shred prions in urine, feces, probably saliva too (the aforementioned paper mentions that this is enough for plant-mediated infection), a trait shared with scrapie-infected sheep, hamsters and, i assume, BSE-infected cows.

Transmission and Detection of Prions in Feces

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803675/

"Oral exposure to prion-tainted blood, urine, saliva and feces have been suggested as modes of transmission for CWD and scrapie among herbivores susceptible to these diseases. Both CWD and scrapie infection is thought likely to enter the body through gut-associated lymphoid tissues, in Peyer's patches in the alimentary tract. Moreover, the presence of the infectious isoform of the prion protein, designated PrPSc, in Peyer's patches suggests alimentary shedding of CWD and scrapie prions into feces. [...]

When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."

Also, birds can spread prions in their litter:

Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017181250.h...

"Crows fed on prion-infected brains from mice can transmit these infectious agents in their feces and may play a role in the geographic spread of diseases caused by prions, such as chronic wasting disease or scrapie."

Why would this be any more likely than other animals?

Perhaps because insects are more evolutionally distant from humans, than mammals for example. That doesn't mean that it's true, but this could be why someone migh assume that it's true.

All currently confirmed prion diseases are mammalian:

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

There is possibility that ostriches can have some form spongiform encephalopathy:

Spongiform encephalopathy in a red-necked ostrich (Struthio camelus) (1991)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1887441/

Luckily, even most mammalian prions have some troubles jumping between mammal species.

For example, sheep scrapie can be transmitted to primates in laboratory, but to date considered non-transmissible to humans in nature (fortunately, as it is insidious and regulations on sheep and goats slaughter are laxer than on bovine):

Transmission of scrapie prions to primate after an extended silent incubation period

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4485159/

"However, one cynomolgus macaque exhibited obvious neurological signs more than 9 years (110 months) after intracerebral exposure to a high dose of a sheep classical scrapie isolate (25 mg of brain)."

BSE prions are much more infectious, not only for humans and ruminants, but for other species too, for example, cats and hamsters.

---

Personally, I don't expect fish or insects to be sources of infection, only potential (if relatively unlikely) transmitters.

That said, apparently nearly everything can be transmitter for prions:

* Fish have prion proteins too (currently, no fish prion diseases are known):

Fish models in prion biology: underwater issues

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20933080/

"To date, the occurrence of TSEs in lower vertebrates like fish and birds has received only limited attention, despite the fact that these animals possess bona fide PrPs."

---

* Birds can transmit prions in their poop, spreading them at great distances (keep it in mind when clearing bird feces):

Crows don't digest prions, may transport them to other locations

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017181250.h...

---

* Insects and parasites can be prion infection vectors:

Could ectoparasites act as vectors for prion diseases?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12786866/

"Fly larvae and mites were exposed to brain-infected material and were readily able to transmit scrapie to hamsters. New lines of evidence have confirmed that adult flies are also able to express prion proteins."

---

* Plants are acting as prion vectors:

Grass plants bind, retain, uptake and transport infectious prions

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4449294/

"Prions bind to plants and bound-PrPSc efficiently sustain prion replication [...] These results indicate that leaves and roots can efficiently bind PrPSc, which remains able to catalyze PrPC to PrPSc conversion, leading to prion replication. [...] After exposure, plants were extensively washed 5 times with water and animals fed with dried material orally. [...] All animals that ingested prion contaminated leaves and roots developed typical prion disease. Although the incubation times were significantly longer in animals ingesting prions attached to leaves and roots as compared with those fed directly with the brain material, the differences were not as high as one could have expected (Fig. 2A)."

---

* Excrements can transmit prions, thus coprophagous animals, insects included, can too:

Transmission and Detection of Prions in Feces

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803675/

When noninfected Syrian hamsters were cohabitated with Syrian hamsters orally infected with Sc237 prions, we observed 80–100% infection rates within 14 days after oral challenge."

---

* Even dust can transmit prions:

Circulation of prions within dust on a scrapie affected farm

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25889731/

"Using protein misfolding cyclic amplification we demonstrate that scrapie PrP(Sc) can be detected within circulating dusts that are present on a farm that is naturally contaminated with sheep scrapie."

---

* Even ashes from not sufficiently hot cremation can transmit prions:

Infectivity studies of both ash and air emissions from simulated incineration of scrapie-contaminated tissues

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15575075/

"We investigated the effectiveness of 15 min exposures to 600 and 1000 degrees C in continuous flow normal and starved-air incineration-like conditions to inactivate samples [...] yielded a total of two transmissions among 21 inoculated animals from the ash of a single specimen burned in normal air at 600 degrees C."

I wonder, how bad is prion contamination of the Ganges river in India?

Can't cooking solve this problem? Rare meat is problematic for this reason. Also my understanding is that some traditions in Judaism and Islam even for allow insect consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy_in_humans#Rejectio...

Yes, there are 4 types of locust that are edible according to Kashrut, but my understanding that it's mostly for the environmental reasons - because migrating locusts causing so much damage to agriculture - the Rabbis permitted to eat them (similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans).

Lately I heard another explanation by Prof. Yigal Bin-Nun[1], that when so called "Judaism" became an organized religion it simply assimilated the previously existing dietary norms and taboos. And the pork wasn't eaten in the entire area even before the first mention of the Israelites. The exception being the Philistines who brought a European pig and wild boar to Canaan. Recently there was a DNA research paper which confirmed that the wild boars in Israel are of European origins, not local ones.

So according to this theory it might be that locusts "whitelisted" by "Judaism" when the Himyarite kingdom was converted, probably because locusts were already consumed before the conversion. Of course it's only my speculation.

The more traditional theory on Kashrut origins:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493194

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493915

EDIT: yet another theory is that pork was prohibited b/c swine shares some similarity with human anatomy and thus both species can share common diseases. So it was prohibited to eat in order to prevent epidemics/pandemics. There is some mentions of this in Jewish sources, but it mostly sounds like an afterthought.

[1] https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%92%D7%90%D7%9C_%D7%9...

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58348355

>> similarly as some vegans are saying that oysters can be eaten since they're sustainable and clean the oceans

Never heard that argument, but it seems like a misunderstanding. Peter Singer made the point that oysters have no nervous system and are therefore as plant-like as animals can come and probably non-sentient. The fact that oysters clean the oceans would also be a pretty strange argument. That's why there are so chock full of contaminants and pathogens in most places and many countries have special allowances to make them street legal when virtually any other food with the same toxin contents would be banned.

Kashrut doesn't says that one need to cook meat, the only exception is being liver, which requires special preparation.

So beef carpaccio, or steak tartar are perfectly Kosher. Exception are Ethiopian Jews who traditionally don't eat popular Ethiopian raw meat dishes.

IMO if something can't be eaten raw - it's best to be avoided in any form.

>> if something can't be eaten raw - it should be avoid in any form.

Some foods are changed by cooking. For example, kidney beans must never be eaten raw, but are tasy and nutritious cooked.

It's probably best to avoid all beans altogether.

The only exceptions are: coffee beans for espresso and cocoa beans for dark chocolate ;)

Beans and legumes are some of the healthiest foods you can eat, being high in both fiber and a range of beneficial phytonutrients. There is no high-quality evidence that lectins in properly prepared beans cause any health problems.

Could you expand on that?

Google it, lots of material on this subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectin#Dietary_lectin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicia_faba#Health_concerns

The sources you provide say that a) cooking inactivates the lectins, b) there is no strong evidence of long term adverse effects in humans.

Hard to trust google on such a query.

I once heard (not sure if it's true) that the Islamic rule for not eating pork was mostly a practical one, because at the time the rule was formulated it was easier to get sick from eating pork relative to other meats.

This is the justification for pork bans in the Jewish Kashrut as well. Also why a lot of people are pretty lax on the pork-eating part nowadays

Not that I want to eat them but you could irradiate the insects to kill anything like they do with spices.

Ah, just run 'em all under a cobalt-60 source. (joke)

Every single strawberry sold commercially in the Netherlands is irradiated. Not for parasites, but fungus AFAIK.

I thought most mass manufactured foodstuffs are irradiated in the West (but I somehow assumed X-ray tubes were used since they could be switched on and off, although a source may be cheaper...)

To irradiate food, you need to keep the photon energy below 1.022 MeV, or you get residual radioactivity due to pair production.

with pair production I assume you mean electron positron pairs?

how is that harmful in food?

the lifetime of a positron wouldn't be very long, or is the concern free radicals?

as I thought pair production is irrelevant in food irradiation

the tolerable limits in particle energies and doses are very high for truly tiny increases in induced radioactivity. its really marginal as long as the very conservative limits are respected.

see for example:

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/te_1287_prn.p...

Sounds good to me. From a medical standpoint, I'm aware that irradiated food is perfectly safe. It's the political utility of saying "no residual radioactivity" that I was focused on. But I guess positrons probably aren't much different from electrons in causing that.

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