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Comment by TuringTest | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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