Also, I highly recommend this Kurzgesagt video on how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sVfTPaxRwk
Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well.
> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions
Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all.
I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.
Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to.
I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.
While it's true marketing can impact how your dollars could actually contribute to better living conditions, I'd just it's defeatist to just throw your hands up and say it doesn't matter.
A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability.
https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...
It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers
I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm… I can’t think of one. Organic might be the biggest success, but even then it’s just an alternative, not a consumer-preference-driven revolution in all commercial agriculture.
Showing that you're willing to pay extra for green products (or products that respect animal welfare, etc) creates a competitive environment in which companies can compete on who provides the most green per dollar. Even if those marked up products are all just greenwashed today, it still creates a market opportunity for new companies to come in and outcompete today's greenwashers with products that deliver better green per dollar in the future.
> together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.
Regulations exists to avoid misleading or lying to customers. Many years of deregulation, thou, have increased the number of scams and increased the price of goods and services. Maybe it was not a good idea.
"I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens."
I assume you don't live in a country that forms a government based on elections. If animal welfare mattered enough, it'd be political.
It's not that the price increase itself leads to better conditions, it's that better conditions necessitate price increases.
There are ways to assess whether a product meets one's standards. They may not be your standards, but it would meet the median for consumers.
I can purchase poultry from a local farm that has an on-site health inspector, where chickens are free-range. In ovo sexing is coming later for eggs. On the poultry side, life in battery cages by far leads to the most suffering. Absent that, given the right conditions, I find the poultry inoffensive and most consumers would too.
I agree there should be legislation, and that has been happening at the state-level.
This doesn’t make sense in the real world… where dollars and financial outcomes are a lot easier to secure (and defend) than political outcomes.
If the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that… sacrificing something vastly rarer, for the average HN reader at least, is just nonsensical.
I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs.
Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.
That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan.
Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical.
Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant.
What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them.
People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement).
The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us.
Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.
This is offtopic (and not affiliated in any way), but I recently read this blog post [https://benthams.substack.com/p/what-to-do-if-you-love-meat-...] which gave me an interesting point of view about this, much in line with what you are saying, but most importantly, an actionable (and easy if you have some spare money) thing to do.
I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference.
Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.
I love meat yet stopped eating all mammalian and fowl protein more than 30 years ago. I compromised with fish, but have gone long stretches without. Yet somehow protein is still very primary in my diet. As many people speak of this difficulty to evolve and change their diet, I have come to theorize that people have a deep seated cultural need for sacrifice -- something must die for their meal to be legitimate. The OP/OA explores the history of this idea. With all of the well developed plant protein options, some imitative of meats and others unique and viable, and the obvious looming problem of scaling livestock production with population growth and climate change, there must be something deep seated holding our evolution back.
Yes, the weird truth is that donating a small percentage of your salary to a charity like this is a lot easier than trying to be vegetarian/vegan while still being about as effective.
That site says ~$25 per month, which is not a lot for engineer salaries. Or $50/month if you want to make up for your past choices too.
FWIW I've donated a lot to The Humane League and Giving What We Can's Animal Welfare Fund.
Octopodes don't actually have a very long lifespan, as adults die shortly after mating. Which is only to say that the decision to consume is more complicated for this creature than others, because if the goal is to minimize suffering, an ethically aquaculture-farmed octopus harvested after mating will not live much longer anyways.
And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.
> And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism.
It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.
> We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating?
Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.
As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.
My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.
At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.
We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.
Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.
The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.
> Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence
You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being.
Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.
Last 5 years or so I buy meat maybe once in 3 months, and that is strictly from the local farm. They have their own cows, goats, pigs and sheep. You just get an email for the next slaughtered animal and reserve the cuts you want. This happens once in 6 weeks, so I do every other event. You can see the animals in the farm, it's all open. It's maybe 50% more expensive than horrible spongy chewy supermarket meat. Sometimes they have game meat which is mummy.
Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit.
Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..
Paying more of course doesn't improve animals' conditions automatically. Improved conditions would most likely increase the price.
But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.
For some products, like free-range eggs, there is the possibility of choosing more ethical options. With many others, the supply chain is opaque, and paying more gives absolutely no guarantee of better conditions. The only way to be sure is if you know a local farmer personally.
So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).
I've seen suggestions that livestock can actually be a key component to carbon sequestration, if done correctly. I think it was mentioned in the documentary Kiss the Ground, narrated by Woody Harrelson, but I may be wrong. I believe the gist was that no-till farming and managed grazing helps to save the topsoil, sequester more carbon dioxide, and make something like cattle farming effectively carbon-negative (ie, they're actually helping to mitigate climate change). I'd recommend watching if you haven't, it shows some compelling examples such as a farmer who's the only one in his area farming this way, and he's also the only one who's having successful harvests while being environmentally conscious.
Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.
This is a good thing to point out. I source most of my meat and eggs from local small farms where I know that the animals are raised in good conditions. Partially because I think it tastes better, partially for the ethics of it. Because of that, I pay more.
But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.
> But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell.
Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7.
Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.
I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture.
In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.
A bit more also can shield you from price shock - if you buy local.
Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.
This is something I hadn't thought of until the current egg sticker shock. I buy my eggs from a local small farm. I'm still paying more than grocery store prices but my price hasn't changed. Meanwhile the local grocery store has increased by a large percentage. To the point where they're almost the same price.
Maybe your frame of reference is Whole Foods or something. Out here the farmers are wise to people “wanting to spend more for humanely-raised meat” and price it accordingly. It’s considerably more expensive at the farmer’s market than what it costs at a regular grocery store.
Yeah it seems like flawed logic to me too. Why is intelligent suffering worse than dumb suffering? Both feel the same pain when slaughtered. Are smart beings "worth" more? Does a smart pig contribute more to society than a dumb pig? Nonsense distinctions lead to nonsense questions I guess.
But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.
The point obviously isn't to give grocery stores more money for no reason, it's to support products that have higher quality standards.
Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place.
Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.
I watched the video but I found his premise that there's extreme market pressure to keep prices low lacking. I think that could be true some places but in highly populated areas like California I think prices could be much lower. Whenever the topic comes up people will highlight how laws/regulations like cage free don't raise prices by that much. Which could be true. What this point sidesteps though is that as a collective these limitations make prices much higher because they mean a large amount of product can only be sourced in-state. In short, they collectively act as a form of protectionism that jacks up prices even if their regional impact is minor. It's minor because they're playing into a paradigm that already wildly jacks up prices. What would bring prices down a lot and by extension benefit the poor Americans in these places a lot more is removing all of the barriers to importing these products from other states where they are significantly cheaper.
I went vegetarian for similar animal welfare / cruelty reasons (though I'll have fish occasionally, but not octopus). We also buy the pasture raised eggs for this reason.
I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.
> how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions
It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.
Eating sustainable meat from local farms has never been bad for the environment, which is what this article actually says as well. Of course plants are less.
Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?
Agreed on octopuses. Sure they taste OK, but it's maybe more of a novelty food than anything else, and when you have read of their alien and physically-distributed intelligence, guilt accompanies any desire to munch one.
Last I heard, the EU is planning intensive octopus farming for meat. The seems really horrible for an intelligent and solitary animal. There are also questions about how humane the proposed killing methods are.
It's sort of a disingenuous video since they try to present 50-200% increases as small by saying it's some number of cents. And ignoring the environmental land use concerns with these lower efficiency approaches
Once you become a vampire meat eater it just becomes so hard to turn it off. It is the most immoral thing I do at the moment and I’m trying to create a multi year plan to be done with this. It’s nothing short of a sin, and to say a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one just sounds like the words of a vampire, a tribe I also belong to.
> a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one
i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.
No they don’t. They build latrines and that is their toilet which they certainly do not sleep in. They cover themselves in mud because it acts as sun block and helps against certain pests. The rooting is either to sort out the land or literally looking for roots, truffles and other things to eat.
We used to own chickens. They had no qualms about walking over their own poop, and getting it between their claws. They would peck through their own poop to look for food, getting it all over their beak. Their idea of a bath was covering themselves in dust.
I've always imagined the taboo originated in some practical reasons (like "pork spoils really quickly in the heat"), but or course that's simplistic, and trying to approach religious things with reasoned explanations is a fool's errand.
This article's take is interesting: economic, environmental and cultural factors that gradually became codified as religious identity markers. The tribality of this tracks, the "us" vs "them" has always been and always will be, and people pick the most random things to differentiate the "us" from "them". It makes perfect sense that these desert tribes, indistinguishable cousins basically, would end up differentiating on something so arbitrary.
Much as the article makes good points, I find it difficult to believe that the list of meats banned by kosher and halal matches the top allergies and disease risk factors as well as it does without some intent. Pork was, until very recently, the greatest risk for parasitic infection, insects in a similar spot. Shellfish are the top meat allergy, by a whole lot. Most of the rest of the rules about preparation amount to good practices for ensuring cleanliness or at least reasonable preservation and parasite prevention. There are exceptions, I can’t think of a practical reason for not allowing meat and dairy to come into contact, but the vast majority would have kept people healthier.
Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.
> I find it difficult to believe that the list of meats banned by kosher and halal matches the top allergies and disease risk factors as well as it does without some intent
Does it? I agree that the risk of trichinosis from pigs was pretty great until modern disease research, chickens for example are a huge risk of Salmonella, and yet they are both kosher and halal. Conversely, camels are a relatively safe food, but they are not kosher. Rabbits and similar animals are also not allowed, despite being relatively safe. Tortoises and whales are not allowed either, despite not posing any special risks. Neither are eels or catfish, again relatively safe foods.
IIRC the meat and dairy mixing is based on a specific passage of exodus or deuteronomy forbidding boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk, which was a ritual practice of the canaanites at one time and so it may have always been an ethnic-religious differentiation thing.
In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.
Zero evidence for that theory. People didn't know parasites existed so that couldn't have been the reason for abstaining from pork. But if that had been their reason they would also have abstained from chicken because it is even more dangerous than pork (salmonella etc.). But to the best of my knowledge, no religion prohibits eating chicken. Neither could the Jewish priests who created the rule have observed that people who ate pork got sick more often than those who abstained because they didn't. People who eat pork do not have worse health outcomes than people who don't. Also, remember that 3000 years ago meat was a luxury. The average person would eat meat a few times per month at most.
Preventing meat and dairy contacting is based on a moral argument against mixing products of life with products of death. I don’t think it was ever about health.
The pig taboo and the cannibalism taboo may both be grounded in the folly of eating carriers dense with the same diseases that we are vulnerable to. It's the same thing that makes pigs good research animal models of human disease.
If this is the reasoning it's preserved quite poorly in the text and clearly was rapidly abandoned as the reason such a practice was reproduced generation after generation. The shibboleth explanation is the most convincing to my eye.
Secondly, if the health consequences were so obvious, I don't think it'd be one of the world's most popular meats millennia before we had such effective treatments for the parasites that come with swine. Furthermore any persistence in eating it despite knowledge of health concerns would surely point to such a taboo being less likely to be effective.
Third, there's a lot of medical practices we know from the time was known to archaeology and virtually none of it was preserved in the Torah. Even if it is medical advice, it's a rather odd way (rhetorically) to specify a specific danger. Whatever medical policy is there seems to serve the goal of social cohesion. Food preparation has been noted multiple times for confirming long-lost branches of the jewish community when knowledge of hebrew, prayers, circumcision, and other rituals faded.
Finally, this just feels like the wrong way to approach these texts as a primary tool to deconstruct them—without comparison of "sibling" cultures (and the best we can do is what samaritanism? Zoroastrianism at a massive reach?), without archeological positive evidence, there's little room for strong conclusions. The question we should be asking is not where this comes from my why it persisted after people forgot the beginning. Religion may serve as a de-facto method of social control, but to think that the people who constructed such a society were just coating secular policy in a hotline-to-god-special is hard to imagine. Whatever cultural event happened to make the taboo stick was clearly very influential.
However—if there is serious danger associated with which god you worship, having strong, difficult-to-hide signals recognized by both man and god to identify friend from foe is pretty compelling to a such a strongly community-oriented faith.
humans have eaten shellfish for millions of years, so whats the practical benefit of lessening the variety of foods you intake? The original reasons for these prohibitions were not scientific in the slightest - its all subjective. dont forget they literally believe themselves to be god "chosen people", not my words, it definitely is an us and them thing
> I've always imagined the taboo originated in some practical reasons (like "pork spoils really quickly in the heat"), but or course that's simplistic, and trying to approach religious things with reasoned explanations is a fool's errand.
This is actually the reason, though, you've just got the order wrong. People noticed that pigs sometimes gave people worms. They didn't know why, or under what conditions, but in order to keep tribe members safe, they developed rules against eating pigs. People would ignore it, so rather than saying "there's something invisible in pork that sometimes makes you sick" they just said "God said don't eat it." People listen to that more than other people.
I've always imagined the Pig taboo originated in the specific practical reason that it's easy to get parasites from pork meat (1), especially if your understanding of food safety and sanitation is pre-modern.
"Originated" however, does not mean that this is actually a compelling reason. Just that someone thought it was. Of course you could argue, "no, it's as safe as anything else if you ..., they could have ...". Maybe they could have, but they didn't.
Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"[1] pulls the thread a bit about how groups tend to build their identity as oppositional to their neighbors - that a tribe who lives next to one known for its ornamentation will tend to develop a culture that spurns such things. This isn't the first thing I've read about some core part of Israelite identity coming as a strong rejection of their neighbors' way of doing things - there was an article here a while back digging into the prohibition against mixed fibers, as well, and an awful lot of the Levitican proclamations seem to be ways to establish a group identity in opposition to the cultures in which the Israelites found themselves embedded in. Even the concept of God - Reza Aslan (yeah yeah) traces the evolution of the concept of a local god of a people to the capital-G God of creation to early Israelites attempts to keep their culture intact in the face of a military defeat by their neighbors.
The article seems to end where it gets interesting.
Greeks and Romans were associated with pigs, so the Jews decide that not eating pork should be a symbol of national identity. But then it says people continued to eat pork in the area. Why? Islam naturally doesn't like pigs due to geography, but what about the Jews? How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?
> But then it says people continued to eat pork in the area. Why?
The Levant area was very multinational. This is one of the things people get confused about in the Bible. Just because somebody is referred to as "A Jew" didn't necessarily mean they were of Hebrew descent or practiced the religion. Especially during Roman times the region was just called Judah. People of the era used the term "jew" generically to refer to people from that region. It didn't mean those people were Hebrew or even particularly religious.
Also the Hebrew people frequently drifted in and out of faith and frequently adopted the practices, religions, customs, and wives/husbands of other peoples.
In fact this is a major theme of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. If not THE major theme. It follows a repeated cycle of the people falling out of faith, bad things start happening, they beg and plead for salvation, God redeems them only to have the cycle repeat in their children's children.
So anybody who has read the Bible shouldn't be surprised when archaeologists discover pork bones or pagan idols among ancient settlements in the region. This is exactly what one would expect.
> How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?
Because it is so conspicuous. Pork and pork products are used in a huge amount of foods and products. Even food that doesn't list it as a ingredient in restaurants frequently uses lard as part of its production.
So it actually requires a lot of effort to avoid it and one can't help but noticing when friends need to have special convesations with the waiters, etc.
> But then it says people continued to eat pork in the area. Why?
Because it was cheaper. The article mentions how much easier it is to raise pigs than sheep or cattle. It also touches on the Isrealites being primarily sheep farmers and the Philistines raised pigs. Which is why I think the prohibition was a form of protectionism. It forces people to buy from Hebrew farms instead of the foreign pork.
Religion, and strict adherence to these laws by the general population, is a relatively late phenomenon. It only became as strict as it is now during the middle ages and more so in early modernity. Your Jewish friends are, to a large extent, a product of 18th-century Eastern European Jewish culture and Western / American homogenised understanding of religion.
The Philistines settled circa 12-13th century BC. Leviticus in its current form dates to circa 6th century BC. And while the origins of the taboo (as well as Leviticus) goes back further than the 6th century, as the article suggests the taboo seems to enter the culture after the Philistines had established themselves.
The problem with this line of thinking is that - in Judaism at least - Pigs aren't special. Anything without split hooves or doesn't chew it's cud is prohibited. Pigs, Camels, Rabbits and the Hare (last 2 are speculative translations) are the only ones mentioned because they have one quality but not the other.
Apparently pigs can be possessed with sprints. I always assumed that was why they were considered unclean.
From Mark 5:
So the demons begged him, "Send us among the pigs, so that we can go into them!" So he let them do this. The unclean spirits came out of the man and went into the pigs
As a kid, I remember being taught by the (Catholic) church that my parents attended that the origin of restriction was due to trying to avoid getting the Tsetse fly parasite, which I guess could have been potentially contracted via poorly prepared pork. I have no idea how accurate this explanation is, but it always seemed at least plausible to me that some religious dietary restrictions might have been codified as a way to try to avoid collective health risks at a time; it doesn't seem crazy they might have noticed a pattern people getting sick after eating certain foods and made rules on how to avoid that, and over time they became part of the religious traditions. I'm not religious now though, so it's also possible that my view of what would be a plausible explanation for religious rules is biased.
Is this not addressed in the article? It mentions how the Greeks and Romans were fans of eating pig and discusses at length how that became a point of friction between those societies.
My personal experience, essentially is that we smell like pork, our bodies, our flesh. So a taboo makes innate sense.
I had surgery, and I was allowed to handle the part of my body that was resected. It was a bone and there was still some of my muscle.
I smelled like the best piece of pork. Like if you had a piece of pork from a pig, which that pig clearly was loved so caringly before it was slaughtered: it was worshipped, and massaged, and fed all the best food. That's what my growth suggested, odoriuosly.
(Cue the Mike Meyers joke about loving the smell of your own farts, from The Goldmember movie series..?)
My conclusion is, humans smell like pork so it's just kind of yucky to lust after the taste of another person.
There are still people who are cannibals, tribes. At least back in the '80s I understand there were active tribes in North Asia, according to a college professor's (of mine) direct experience.
The Quran hints on that similarity in a verse about punishing people by converting them to pigs and apes. Though this is not given as a reason of why pork is forbidden, but Islam places itself as a continuation of Abrahamic religion of Judaism and Christianity so most rules are kept and followed.
> “The Hebrew Bible equally bans eating the pig, the camel, the hare, and other animals,” he says. Fish without scales, rock badgers, and certain birds were also off-limits.
> Muslims took a middle ground, rejecting most Jewish dietary restrictions but accepting the prohibition on pork. The Koran says the pig is unclean and therefore forbidden, along with blood, dead animals, and animals not dedicated to Allah.
The discrepancies can be traced back to the house of Abraham, where both Jews and Muslim claimed the lineage of their religious authority and laws.
According to Muslim traditions eating pork prohibition is existed since the very early beginning of human and perhaps can be traced back to prophet Noah time.
The thing with the Jews is that regarding the many dietary constraints because they have three approaches for prohibitions:
1) Original prohibitions from their one God (similar to Muslim since they're both from the house of Abraham) and eating pork prohibition is part of the original commandmends
2) Extra or additional dietary constraints from their one God as form of punishments for their corrupt and evil deeds
3) Self imposed dietary constraints not ordained by their one God but by their very own pundits
These 3 dietary things become accumulated, mixed and covoluted by the scribes of Jewish religious books as if they were all comes from their one God commandments
When Islam come it reverted back to the original dietary constraints of the house of Abraham. Please note that he is not a Jew but a prophet sent to the Semite people, and the father of Ishak and Ismail, whereby both are also prophets, and the progenitors of Jewish and Islamic faith, respectively.
For the record I'm not saying that Jews are evil, but if they happened to do any wrongdoings or evil deeds, for example worshipping other fake god in the form of false deity/human/cow/idols/etc beside their one true God they'll be punished accordingly whether in this world or hereafter, or both. This fact is mentioned in Jewish own holy books including Torah and the Bible namely Old and New Testaments (Jesus is a Jew speaking Aramaic - an Arabic like language spoken around Jerusalem during Roman time). This universal God's rule is also applies to Muslim and everyone else as far as Muslim are concerned.
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Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well.
Also, as a rule of thumb, "less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint", https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat.
Not exactly. Supermarkets also jack up prices without any improvement at all.
I.e. better conditions require higher prices, but higher prices can mean better conditions or more supermarket profit. And the supermarket is incentivized to pick profit, together with pretty pictures and words that "suggest" better conditions.
Which is why I don't generally trust the wording on packages with regard to animal conditions. I'm not an expert in which exact phrases legally mean substantially better conditions, vs. which ones sound good but aren't meaningful at all. Nor should I be expected to.
I'd much prefer the government just legislated conditions that are humane. Either animal welfare matters or it doesn't. It doesn't make any sense for it to depend on individual consumers. A few people buying top-tier eggs isn't ever going to improve anything for the vast majority of hens.
A consumer can look up certifications like Certified Humane which does audits on farms to ensure they're following the required standards. While I'm sure it's not a perfect system it does hold farms to some accountability. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/consumer-resources/c...
I’m trying to think of a single example where one of these “vote with your wallet” certification movements have ultimately triumphed and become the new norm… I can’t think of one. Organic might be the biggest success, but even then it’s just an alternative, not a consumer-preference-driven revolution in all commercial agriculture.
Regulations exists to avoid misleading or lying to customers. Many years of deregulation, thou, have increased the number of scams and increased the price of goods and services. Maybe it was not a good idea.
I assume you don't live in a country that forms a government based on elections. If animal welfare mattered enough, it'd be political.
Popular sentiment has had some influence on the human animal, at least. E.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act
There are ways to assess whether a product meets one's standards. They may not be your standards, but it would meet the median for consumers.
I can purchase poultry from a local farm that has an on-site health inspector, where chickens are free-range. In ovo sexing is coming later for eggs. On the poultry side, life in battery cages by far leads to the most suffering. Absent that, given the right conditions, I find the poultry inoffensive and most consumers would too.
I agree there should be legislation, and that has been happening at the state-level.
If the vast majority aren’t willing to use their wallets to back this or that… sacrificing something vastly rarer, for the average HN reader at least, is just nonsensical.
Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.
Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical.
Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them.
People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement).
The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us.
Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.
I have since started donating to the mentioned organization, because I can't really bring myself to stop eating meat for several reasons (although I do avoid octopus just as you do), but at least this way I believe I might make a small difference.
Also, I recommend not reading the linked post about factory farm hell if you'd like to avoid having horrific descriptions planted in your head for weeks.
That site says ~$25 per month, which is not a lot for engineer salaries. Or $50/month if you want to make up for your past choices too.
FWIW I've donated a lot to The Humane League and Giving What We Can's Animal Welfare Fund.
And I've always found the argument that "more intelligent/sentient creatures deserve more protection and rights" to be basically a post hoc defense against cannibalism. We can't know what "suffering" feels like to less intelligent and "simpler" animals so why make our sentience a criterion for the morality of eating? Just from a safety concern we shouldn't be eating humans, but not because we "suffer uniquely more" than other species.
It's not some veiled aversion to cannibalism, it's because humans have empathy for other humans, and our empathy for non-humans scales with how human-like we perceive those animals to be. If someone sees intelligence as a defining trait of humanity, then they're likely to empathize with animals that display great intelligence. And if you empathize with the animal, you're more likely to be sensitive to its perceived suffering.
Using the power of the scientific method, we can form hypothesis. Take a bite out of a few hundred people, give them IQ tests. Give surveys. Use induction.
As our ability to communicate with more and more animals improves with technology, start giving them surveys after taking a bite out of them.
My hypothesis is that every animal along the questionnaire wave front will overwhelmingly self report that they prefer not to be eaten.
At some point, we'll all have to wring our hands about an arXiv preprint where somebody convincingly lets us know that the corn doesn't like being eaten either.
We'll find a few really depressed plants and animals that are ready to be eaten, and some people will propose we make the world a more depressing place so there's more consent in all this. That's a bad take, but the argument will last 1000 years. All the while everyone and everything will keep on eating and eating.
Have you ever sat and thought about all the eating that has gone into making this moment for you? Like, all the eating you've done, all the eating of the creatures and plants that you've eaten have done. All your ancestors. So on and so forth back to the simplest primordial chemical reactions. Life is the tip of the spear atop a long cone of death and teeth gnashing. It's quite horrific.
The universe would be a lot more chill if we could just leave the clouds of fluorine to meditate. They're quite serene when they do that.
Pigs are thought to be closer to toddlers in intelligence and they can use tools without any human help. Personally, I never eat them. Too weird.
You're making a common mistake here, in conflating pigs being compatible with toddlers based on a very limited scope test, with being comparable to toddlers in general, which they are not remotely close to being.
Pigs are comparable to dogs, but dogs are much more impressive overall. Lookup dogs like Chaser, for example, and show me a pig that has ever come close.
Chicken per kg costs as much as beef, if not more. But it is so tasty! They are from another farm, which is also open to visit.
Reducing my meat consumption and going for higher quality helped me to appreciate meat more! It's a speciality. I think about the dish days ahead, what side dish I should make, which wine should I pair it with..
But even with quite hefty price increse, the conditions will still be a living hell. And for an individual eating animals and animal produce is about the most environmentally harmful thing conducted regularly regardless of the price.
So, I think there should be much better regulations about minimal living conditions (though this would face strong opposition).
Additionally, it would be wonderful if every animal-derived product had a recent photo (within the last year) from the exact farm of origin. It would be even better if every food product included a CO2e per calorie estimate (see e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore).
Also, farmed livestock don't automatically exist in a "living hell". Factory farms, yeah, but a properly-managed ranch should have happy, healthy animals.
But if one goes to the local supermarket, it's easy to find upbranded labels charging more for who knows what. Probably mostly to fund their marketing budget.
Local farmers markets sell animals that had quite happy lives. Some farms even have live webcams where you can check in on the animals 24/7.
Honestly the prices aren't always that much higher, especially for certain cuts, with prices being at worst, about the same as higher end grocery stores, and at best, halfway between fancy grocery stores and a regular supermarket.
I've seen what better farms look like and I disagree. It most closely matches what consumers want and expect. Suffering is non-zero because it necessitate slaughter, but not as egregious as in commercial agriculture.
In other words, there is a threshold of suffering consumers are ok with.
Could our egg farm sold theirs to some big city for big bucks during the eggsistential crisis? Probably, but they didn’t have it setup and just kept selling through normal channels and basically the same price.
But it does pile on more proof for that theory that on some level we are just "inteligence" personified and tend to instinctively act in the interest of inteligence as a concept. Probably also why we're nice to LLMs on principle despite them having zero ability to suffer, and we like to fantasize about making galaxy spanning alliances with smart aliens.
If all humans had the IQ of a waffle, then it would be reasonably fine to farm humans.
And even if I bought the more expensive animal products it would also not in any way affect the animal's living conditions.
The price of an animal product in no way affects the way the producer treats the animal. You have the causation completely backwards.
Take poultry as an example, standards vary by county, but the differences between quality labels can be stark. Cheap poultry is often raised in tiny indoor cages and they need to be pumped full of antibiotics due to the unhealthy living conditions. On the other end of the spectrum, organic poultry is free to roam in fields and the coops are regularly moved or kept clean, avoiding the need for antibiotics in the first place.
Even if you disagree that the latter provides a better quality product, it's pretty clear that supporting brands with higher standards results in better living conditions for the animals.
I don't care that much about individual carbon footprint personally.
It does not. Farms will happily eat the additional earnings and wont improve animals living conditions just because they have money. What improves animal living conditions are regulations and their actual enforcement. That may raise cost of the meat, sure. But just paying more wont improve nothing.
Also, this article looks extremely deceptive. "Feed and excreta at the bottom of warm, unaerated fish ponds can create more methane than cows" - more than how many cows?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64814781
Billionaire Egg Baron Pays Contract Farmers Just 26 Cents Per Dozen - https://farmaction.us/exposed-billionaire-egg-baron-pays-con...
Paying more could improve living conditions, but without directly forcing farms to provide better conditions, it won't.
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i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.
https://clip.cafe/pulp-fiction-1994/want-some-bacon/
Do you also forgo chicken?
This article's take is interesting: economic, environmental and cultural factors that gradually became codified as religious identity markers. The tribality of this tracks, the "us" vs "them" has always been and always will be, and people pick the most random things to differentiate the "us" from "them". It makes perfect sense that these desert tribes, indistinguishable cousins basically, would end up differentiating on something so arbitrary.
Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.
Does it? I agree that the risk of trichinosis from pigs was pretty great until modern disease research, chickens for example are a huge risk of Salmonella, and yet they are both kosher and halal. Conversely, camels are a relatively safe food, but they are not kosher. Rabbits and similar animals are also not allowed, despite being relatively safe. Tortoises and whales are not allowed either, despite not posing any special risks. Neither are eels or catfish, again relatively safe foods.
In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.
https://www.eara.eu/pigs-and-animal-research
Secondly, if the health consequences were so obvious, I don't think it'd be one of the world's most popular meats millennia before we had such effective treatments for the parasites that come with swine. Furthermore any persistence in eating it despite knowledge of health concerns would surely point to such a taboo being less likely to be effective.
Third, there's a lot of medical practices we know from the time was known to archaeology and virtually none of it was preserved in the Torah. Even if it is medical advice, it's a rather odd way (rhetorically) to specify a specific danger. Whatever medical policy is there seems to serve the goal of social cohesion. Food preparation has been noted multiple times for confirming long-lost branches of the jewish community when knowledge of hebrew, prayers, circumcision, and other rituals faded.
Finally, this just feels like the wrong way to approach these texts as a primary tool to deconstruct them—without comparison of "sibling" cultures (and the best we can do is what samaritanism? Zoroastrianism at a massive reach?), without archeological positive evidence, there's little room for strong conclusions. The question we should be asking is not where this comes from my why it persisted after people forgot the beginning. Religion may serve as a de-facto method of social control, but to think that the people who constructed such a society were just coating secular policy in a hotline-to-god-special is hard to imagine. Whatever cultural event happened to make the taboo stick was clearly very influential.
However—if there is serious danger associated with which god you worship, having strong, difficult-to-hide signals recognized by both man and god to identify friend from foe is pretty compelling to a such a strongly community-oriented faith.
This is actually the reason, though, you've just got the order wrong. People noticed that pigs sometimes gave people worms. They didn't know why, or under what conditions, but in order to keep tribe members safe, they developed rules against eating pigs. People would ignore it, so rather than saying "there's something invisible in pork that sometimes makes you sick" they just said "God said don't eat it." People listen to that more than other people.
"Originated" however, does not mean that this is actually a compelling reason. Just that someone thought it was. Of course you could argue, "no, it's as safe as anything else if you ..., they could have ...". Maybe they could have, but they didn't.
1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9501363/
1: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-hi...
Greeks and Romans were associated with pigs, so the Jews decide that not eating pork should be a symbol of national identity. But then it says people continued to eat pork in the area. Why? Islam naturally doesn't like pigs due to geography, but what about the Jews? How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?
The Levant area was very multinational. This is one of the things people get confused about in the Bible. Just because somebody is referred to as "A Jew" didn't necessarily mean they were of Hebrew descent or practiced the religion. Especially during Roman times the region was just called Judah. People of the era used the term "jew" generically to refer to people from that region. It didn't mean those people were Hebrew or even particularly religious.
Also the Hebrew people frequently drifted in and out of faith and frequently adopted the practices, religions, customs, and wives/husbands of other peoples.
In fact this is a major theme of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. If not THE major theme. It follows a repeated cycle of the people falling out of faith, bad things start happening, they beg and plead for salvation, God redeems them only to have the cycle repeat in their children's children.
So anybody who has read the Bible shouldn't be surprised when archaeologists discover pork bones or pagan idols among ancient settlements in the region. This is exactly what one would expect.
> How does it become pretty much the thing you remember every time you're out with your Jewish friends?
Because it is so conspicuous. Pork and pork products are used in a huge amount of foods and products. Even food that doesn't list it as a ingredient in restaurants frequently uses lard as part of its production.
So it actually requires a lot of effort to avoid it and one can't help but noticing when friends need to have special convesations with the waiters, etc.
Archeology tells us that common people of ancient Judea/Israel were more flexible in their practice than post-Roman orthodoxy implies.
From Asherah statues to an entire Temple (Elephantine island on the Nile) working in parallel to the Jerusalem Temple.
The matter of strict adherence as a National identity/religious practice became important following the Diaspora following the Rome-Jewish wars.
Because it was cheaper. The article mentions how much easier it is to raise pigs than sheep or cattle. It also touches on the Isrealites being primarily sheep farmers and the Philistines raised pigs. Which is why I think the prohibition was a form of protectionism. It forces people to buy from Hebrew farms instead of the foreign pork.
And even communities that are even further away like Ethiopia, Yemen, and India, are mostly following the same pattern?
Modern Judaism is very much connected to the state of affairs of ancient Israel/Judah from 24 centuries ago.
Apparently pigs can be possessed with sprints. I always assumed that was why they were considered unclean.
From Mark 5: So the demons begged him, "Send us among the pigs, so that we can go into them!" So he let them do this. The unclean spirits came out of the man and went into the pigs
https://biblehub.com/isv/mark/5.htm
I'm interested to know why these were picked out for prohibition.
I had surgery, and I was allowed to handle the part of my body that was resected. It was a bone and there was still some of my muscle.
I smelled like the best piece of pork. Like if you had a piece of pork from a pig, which that pig clearly was loved so caringly before it was slaughtered: it was worshipped, and massaged, and fed all the best food. That's what my growth suggested, odoriuosly.
(Cue the Mike Meyers joke about loving the smell of your own farts, from The Goldmember movie series..?)
My conclusion is, humans smell like pork so it's just kind of yucky to lust after the taste of another person.
There are still people who are cannibals, tribes. At least back in the '80s I understand there were active tribes in North Asia, according to a college professor's (of mine) direct experience.
Perhaps the pork prohibition also has some anti-cannibal echos in it. You're never sure if your pork stew is grandma?
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
I'd be delicious.
https://youtu.be/gOE-q20RcDM?si=CrT9aV6SwutgZsAG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sew4rctKghY
> Muslims took a middle ground, rejecting most Jewish dietary restrictions but accepting the prohibition on pork. The Koran says the pig is unclean and therefore forbidden, along with blood, dead animals, and animals not dedicated to Allah.
The discrepancies can be traced back to the house of Abraham, where both Jews and Muslim claimed the lineage of their religious authority and laws.
According to Muslim traditions eating pork prohibition is existed since the very early beginning of human and perhaps can be traced back to prophet Noah time.
The thing with the Jews is that regarding the many dietary constraints because they have three approaches for prohibitions:
1) Original prohibitions from their one God (similar to Muslim since they're both from the house of Abraham) and eating pork prohibition is part of the original commandmends
2) Extra or additional dietary constraints from their one God as form of punishments for their corrupt and evil deeds
3) Self imposed dietary constraints not ordained by their one God but by their very own pundits
These 3 dietary things become accumulated, mixed and covoluted by the scribes of Jewish religious books as if they were all comes from their one God commandments
When Islam come it reverted back to the original dietary constraints of the house of Abraham. Please note that he is not a Jew but a prophet sent to the Semite people, and the father of Ishak and Ismail, whereby both are also prophets, and the progenitors of Jewish and Islamic faith, respectively.
Jews don’t consider themselves evil.
Also the Torah has no view on Muslims because Islam didn’t exist yet when the Torah was written.
For the record I'm not saying that Jews are evil, but if they happened to do any wrongdoings or evil deeds, for example worshipping other fake god in the form of false deity/human/cow/idols/etc beside their one true God they'll be punished accordingly whether in this world or hereafter, or both. This fact is mentioned in Jewish own holy books including Torah and the Bible namely Old and New Testaments (Jesus is a Jew speaking Aramaic - an Arabic like language spoken around Jerusalem during Roman time). This universal God's rule is also applies to Muslim and everyone else as far as Muslim are concerned.