My (earnest, irate) thoughts

I love the conversation between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction about why the former doesn’t eat pork (In sum, “I don’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces”). It’s a good point.

“Forbidden to you for food are dead meat, blood, and the flesh of the swine.” Qur’an 5:4

Both the Bible and the Qur’an prohibit the eating of pork. Muslims and orthodox Jews observe this strictly, though many Christians do not (my grandparents are seventh-day Adventists who avoid it, but they are an exception). I remember when I was reading the Bible as a teenager. I made the ambitious mistake of beginning at Genesis, so by the time I got to Leviticus I was dying of boredom. But I couldn’t help but notice the prohibition of pork which, at the time, was a fair part of my typically American diet. Distressed, I asked my father why we ate pork.

Aside: I will never understand why I considered him an expert on theology. When I learned about Muhammad’s prophecy to the Arabs in 10th-grade world history class and asked, “How do we know he’s not a prophet?” My father said, “Only Jews can be prophets, honey. They are God’s chosen people.” This is an openly racist, and sadly common, misreading of the difference between ‘family’ and ‘race’. As my husband would say, “God is a nationalist, you think so?”

Anyway, Dad’s answer was that Jesus said it is what comes out of your mouth, not what goes into it, that makes a man unclean. But knowing what I know now, about various people changing the words of the Bible for personal and political reasons, I still wouldn’t say that Jesus never said this. But the quote doesn’t change the fact that Jesus himself never ate pork. The quote also doesn’t change the physiology of pigs or humans. And the quote is certainly not advising Christians to include pork in their diet. It’s interesting that Paul was writing to the Romans (who very much dug on swine) when he, or his followers, casually removed the ancient prohibition. As I’ve written before, I maintain that Paul was a shape-shifter — someone who changed the words of the unchanging God to appeal to a broader audience. Further reading: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

“Do not eat swine. They have divided hooves, but they do not chew the cud. These are unclean animals.” Leviticus 11:7-8

The Hebrew words used to describe unclean meats (like pork) can be translated as foul, polluted and putrid. Which puts them, according to the lexicon of the Bible at least, in the same category with human feces. But why?

According to The Maker’s Diet by Jordan S. Rubin, a book that tries to pinpoint a Biblically sound diet, the pig is not clean because of its physiology. “Clean animals that chew the cud have an alimentary canal and a secondary cud receptacle. Essentially, they have three stomachs available to process their clean, vegetation-based food into “flesh” in a process that takes more than twenty-four hours in general…Pigs, on the other hand, never limit their diet to vegetation. They will eat anything they can find, including their own young and sick or dead pigs. The pig’s single-stomach arrangement is very simple in design and function and it is combined with a limited excretory system. Four hours after the pig has eaten its polluted swill and other putrid, offensive matter, man may eat the same swill secondhand off the ribs of the pig.”

Then he asks an insightful question: Did anything biologically happen to the pig since Biblical times, or did the digestive tract of man have some miraculous transformation?

Nope. But most practicing Christians, when asked why they eat pork, don’t have a better answer than Vincent: “Because bacon tastes good.” Surely, as religious people, lifelong health and protecting the body from harm should be more important than 30 seconds on the tastebuds. But even if the pig’s behavior and physiology don’t convince you to quit eating pork, here’s some information about American pig farms that should: Vast Lagoons of Pig Feces.