Pork in Jewish Culture
From Women's Studies
Pork in Jewish Culture
By Hope Tremblay
Content
In Marvin Harris’ essay “The Abominable Pig,” he explores possible reasons why pigs were declared as unfit to eat by God in the Old Testament. He first points out why, in general, raising pigs for meat is a much more fruitful endeavor. Compared to cows and sheep, pigs turn more of their food into flesh, have a shorter gestational period, give birth to more life young at one time, and are fully grown in a shorter period of time. Then he states some of the arguments used to explain making the abstinence from pork-eating a law – they eat and wallow in filth, their meat carries disease – and explains why they shouldn’t make much sense. When there is a need, other domestic animals will eat feces, and all undercooked meats carry the potential for spreading disease. The explanation he offers takes an approach that’s more about the economy and the resources required to raise pigs for meat. Animals with ruminating stomachs do very well with eating tough grasses and plants that humans cannot eat, while pigs have stomachs more similar to humans and must share in the same food supply. Pigs also need shade or some external way of cooling off, which is why they are seen to wallow in excrement. The area itself is not very well-suited for raising swine, especially with a growing human population. Pigs thrive more in a shady forest area, while the demands of more and more humans cause forests to be taken down to make way for crop fields. The land then becomes more desert-like, and it becomes more and more costly to raise pigs because their needs are harder to meet. In short, Harris’ theory is that the ban of swine comes from the impracticality of raising them. It is very different from the generally perceived and discussed cultural aspect of not eating pork. Jewish people in the United States, for example, have no ecological need to keep abstaining from pig meat because the meat is provided fairly inexpensively and Americans as a whole are not competing with pigs for certain foods. They continue to uphold these outdated (from Harris’ point of view) laws more for tradition and identity, which fits in better with Mary Douglas’ ideas of danger and encroachment. I take these to mean the encroachment of other societal norms into the Jewish way of life and the danger of Jewish culture being lost to the big conglomeration of cultures that is American culture.
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