Every stoneage tribe on the face of the earth has taboos and rules about food dreamed up by shamans or priests who wanted to isolate and control the clan, tribe or nation for their benefit and power, or just because that "leader" had a personal prejudice about something. Competent rabbis will tell you that the purpose of those Levitical food laws was "holiness," which meant keeping the Israelites separate and isolated from their neighbors. (Read Ezra and Nehemiah if you doubt that statement.)
Those laws and strictures guaranteed the power and pre-eminence of the priests and kings and the religion they had concocted and excluded outsiders from partaking of any accumulated tribal or national wealth and watering down the supposed genetic purity of the people. It was an "ours doesn't stink, but everyone else's does" society. There's a whole lot of that attitude extant today.
People have all kinds of emotionally based food prejudices. The internet is loaded with all kinds of certitudes about any number of things from GMOs (vilified as "frankenfoods") to all kinds of wonder foods guaranteed to solve all your problems or foods that will supposedly slowly kill you.
I no longer worry about food taboos. I know my digestive system is set up to break everything I take in down to its basic building blocks and distribute those to my blood stream where they eventually wind up nourishing my tissues. Bacon as such never reaches a single cell. It's molecular components do. Since my body handles cholesterol and most other things very well, it isn't dangerous to my heart either, but it might be to someone else who is less geneticaly blessed. I love a good BLT, lobster tail, shrimp and king crab legs with the drawn butter that makes them so delicious. Every checkup shows me as healthy overall as I was at age 21, so, I'm not going to worry.
Herbert Amstrong liked to bombastically parade his ignorance with terms like "garbage cans of the ocean."
People have all kinds of emotionally based food prejudices. The internet is loaded with all kinds of certitudes about any number of things from GMOs (vilified as "frankenfoods") to all kinds of wonder foods guaranteed to solve all your problems or foods that will supposedly slowly kill you.
I no longer worry about food taboos. I know my digestive system is set up to break everything I take in down to its basic building blocks and distribute those to my blood stream where they eventually wind up nourishing my tissues. Bacon as such never reaches a single cell. It's molecular components do. Since my body handles cholesterol and most other things very well, it isn't dangerous to my heart either, but it might be to someone else who is less geneticaly blessed. I love a good BLT, lobster tail, shrimp and king crab legs with the drawn butter that makes them so delicious. Every checkup shows me as healthy overall as I was at age 21, so, I'm not going to worry.
Herbert Amstrong liked to bombastically parade his ignorance with terms like "garbage cans of the ocean."
Well, guess what?
Everything you eat comes from some kind of garbage! What do you think the compost you're advised to put on gardens and fields is? Garbage! The whole universe is composed of recycled garbage from old stars that exploded. You probably have a few atoms in your body that once inhabited not only spatial molecular clouds but ancient and now extinct amphibians and reptiles. The garbage in soil gets broken down by (nasty) bacteria and the byproducts of that breakdown are then filtered through the soil, the roots and bodies of plants and often through the digestive systems of animals before you eat the end product and repeat the process. You have a virtual fermentation factory between your mouth and your anus! A lot of people eat special yogurt and take bacteria loaded pills to make it work better, without a single qualm over what they are putting in their mouths.
My cousin recently posted something detailing the process to which meat byproducts are subjected to produce some of the things we dote on the most -- like hotdogs. When I laid out these facts to her and reminded her of what her digestive system does to food, she deeided to go to one of her favorite haunts and have one of their super-delicious hotdogs.
Relax folks. There are no "franken foods." There's no way to escape the unpretty aspects of eating food, but you'd better eat if you expect to live very long.
