Despite the popularity of pork in much of the world, it can also be observed that no other domestic animal has provoked such negative reactions in so many as the pig. In Western countries, swine are commonly seen as a metaphor for filthy, greedy, smelly, lazy, stubborn, and mean. Yet these presumed attributes have not prevented pork consumption. In other cultures, however, strongly negative attitudes toward the pig have historically resulted in its rejection as human food and even, in some cases, as an animal fit to look at.
About one-fifth of the world’s population refrains from eating pork as a matter of principle. Muslims, 800 million strong, form the largest block of pork rejecters because the pig is specifically named in the Koran as an object of defilement. A millennium earlier, Jews had also decided that the pig was unacceptable as a source of food. In the Bible (Leviticus), the animal is rejected because it does not meet the arcane requirements of both having a split hoof (which it has) and chewing the cud (which it does not). It is quite possible that the prophet Mohammed acquired his conception of the pig as an unclean animal from the Jewish tradition.
The Jews, in turn, may have gotten their basic and negative idea about the pig from other neighboring peoples (Simoons 1994). Brian Hesse (1990), investigating Iron Age Palestine, found no evidence for a significant cultic role for pigs, which raises the intriguing question of whether Hebrew rules prohibited a food that no one ate in the first place. Although the Hittites of Anatolia kept pigs, they entertained negative notions about them. In dynastic Egypt, swineherds were a caste apart; pigs acquired a reputation for being unclean, and their flesh was not eaten by priests. Marvin Harris (1985) has asserted that because the pig does not fit into the hot and dry conditions of the Middle East, the Israelites banned it as an ecological misfit. Others, however, believe that the history of this fascinating taboo is more complicated than that (Simoons 1994).
Within the Christian tradition, adherents of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church do not consume pork, yet their religiously affiliated Coptic brothers in Egypt do eat it. Many Buddhists and the great majority of Hindus refuse pig meat, although in both cases this avoidance arises more from vegetarian conviction than from any explicit religious taboo toward the animal. The Mongols, those nomadic folk of central Asia whose way of life is ill suited to pig keeping, consider the pig to be a symbol of Chinese culture.
Historic reluctance to keep pigs and consume pork has also been noted in Scotland. Eric B. Ross (1983) has explained the rise of the Scottish aversion to the pig as a response to the ecological cost of keeping pigs after the decline of oak and beech forests. Because sheep raising best suited the subsequent moorland landscape, mutton became a cheaper and socially more acceptable source of animal protein.
World History
