Jack S.
9/21/14
Marvin Harris

Thoughts and Reflections on: Pig Lovers and Pig Haters

Pig was not a commonly eaten food in the ancient Middle East and this is for a couple of reasons. One of the biggest and most obvious ones opens that pigs were dirty and people though if you ate them you would become dirty also. Pigs would roll around in here own waste because pigs are meant to live in a rainy environment that has trees and shade this is so they could stay cool. When you think of the Middle East those are not the first things that come to mind, so the pigs were forced to roll in their own waste to keep cool. When people would eat pig back then they would not cook it properly and/or long enough so this would cause the people who did eat it to get sick. When people at this unclean meat they thought whoever ate it was dirty and became different. To make people stop eating the pig so they would not get sick people made it into  religious ordeal. They said God had forbidden people from eating pig, so many more people began to stop eating pig. In the 12th century to physician to the Egyptian emperor had come to the conclusion that pig was truly bad for you and not just because God said it was. This silenced some of the religious side of the argument. Then in the 19th century trichinosis was discovered which people though would have put an end to the religious part of the argument, but it didn't. The religious believers said that if we found out about trichinosis then there must be a bigger concern that only God knows about and we housing question him. All in all, pig had become a frowned upon food in the Middle East. These reasons to not eat pig are all a little sketchy and people would always try to bend the argument in their favor. The true reasons pig wasn't eaten are environmental. Pigs eat the same food as humans because they're stomach can not digest grass, so when the pigs eat the humans food there is less for the actual humans which causes them to find something els to eat which can effect the environment.