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ShutYourCakeHorn

Gassers/Say "Cookie" Alt
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73,483
He's Asian? Him ribbing my cat photos makes me vurrry uncomfortable now.
Your cat would eliminate this bug person on sight, funster.

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Lamont & Tonelli

Brevity is... wit.
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55,251
Common sense would probably dictate that pigs make for inefficient livestock in arid pastoral cultures, they're competition rather than an asset. Conversely, they're really useful in temperate, wet forested or urban regions where pork consumption has been a staple since the dawn of agriculture.
Also consider the very real threat of trichinosis and lack of preventatives like refrigeration, and edicts from God banning consumption of pork and shellfish start to make more practical sense. I hadn't thought of that angle, thanks for the illumination.
 

Chive Turkey

Erock Army Deserter
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32,267
Also consider the very real threat of trichinosis and lack of preventatives like refrigeration, and edicts from God banning consumption of pork and shellfish start to make more practical sense. I hadn't thought of that angle, thanks for the illumination.
I mean, the risk of trichinosis has been a bit overblown, not for entirely undue reasons. It's something that is horrific and can seriously fuck you up bad for life if you get a good bout of it but even back in the day it was a relatively rare food borne illness. You've always been far more likely to get and die from salmonella or E. coli from chicken or poorly washed vegetables and those foods have remained a universal staple across mankind despite the risks in even the most sanitized of conditions.

@Wisconsin.gov is right to be critical of trichinosis being the reason behind Muslim or Jewish prohibition laws. Trichinosis is a parasitical infection rather than a viral or bacterial one. It's very specific to the person and it's comparatively late-onset in how it works. People back in pre-modern times wouldn't have been able to link it effectively to one cause or the other even if they did recognise that there it was a distinct disease. Prohibitions on pork consumption have consistently been extremely culture-specific and are perhaps, shockingly, the result of culture-specific reasons. Whether you think the beliefs those cultures hold are true, or whether you take a more distant anthropological stance.

The lack of refrigeration is another purported reason I find lacking. People in pre-industrial times weren't idiots and, when slaughtering an animal, would take pains to eat fresh whatever they could and carefully cure and preserve whatever they couldn't. Meat was a significant (time and money) investment for most people and they wouldn't waste a bit if they could help it. It reminds me of those other dumbass tropes like "Medieval Europeans never drank water, only beer" or "people used spices to mask the taste of rotten meat". It's just modern people dismissing people in the past as retards. In many ways they were, but the one thing I'll grant them is that they were probably more knowledgable about the practicalities of food preservation than the Tomlinson of today.
 
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