The Rhetoric of Pork - Essay Example

Then he proposes some opinions and arguments to clarify making the avoidance from pork-consumption a commandment – they consume and stagger in smut, their flesh transmits disease – then enlightens why they mustn’t fulfill the logic. If there is a dire necessity, other farm animals will consume feces, moreover all undercooked meats have the possibility for scattering disease. The clarification he puts forth takes a methodology that has more to do with the economics and the assets needed to raise pigs for getting meat.

Beasts that have ruminating bellies do quite fine with ingesting hard plants and grasses that human cannot consume, whereas pigs have bellies that resemble more with human beings and need to stake in the same food source. Pigs also need shadow or some exterior method of cooling their bodies, which is the reason they are observed to lurch in filth. Even the space is not well-matched for raising pigs, particularly with developing human inhabitants. Pigs flourish better in dense forests; whereas the needs of more human population causes woodlands to be wiped off to make room for harvesting fields.

The area then starts to look more like a desert, plus it gets pricier to raise swine since their necessities are tougher to provide. In brief, Harris’ concept is that the prohibition of pigs arises out of the unwieldiness of nurturing them. It is very unlike the commonly supposed and argued cultural characteristic of not eating pigs. Jewish community in the United States, for instance, has no environmental need to keep abstinence from eating pork since the meat is supplied figuratively on a shoestring and American people on the whole are also not contending with pork for particular diets.

Arguments of Mary Douglas Douglas proposed that food proscriptions sanctioned by religion as cited in Deuteronomy and Leviticus are amongst the resources by which particular groups uphold their preservations and exclusiveness, therefore providing them a robust identity or social emblems. More tangibly, when a person declares his association with a certain group that he/she respects as his self-enclosed universe and outside whose boundaries he sees risk, menace, and hostility, he concurrently summons—openly or covertly—the many emblems of his social identity.

There must be compactness between outrages that will make complete sense of all specific limitations. These prohibitions contaminate the individual, so by not consuming the vile animals, one can be clean or 'Holy', so these eating guidelines one way or another demonstrate holiness. Holiness is extensiveness, harmony, amalgamation, excellence. Holiness connotes protecting discrete classes of design. It includes specific definition, discernment and direction. The animals presented in sacrifice must be without imperfection, just like females must be cleaned after giving birth, so must the lepers be parted and ceremonially cleaned.

 For instance, in the time of Leviticus, filthy lifestyles of a warrior prohibited him from combating. Animals that are hoofed and chew cud (sheep, cattle, goat, etc.) are farm animals used by the early Hebrews, therefore they are the appropriate food of these folks and a fragment of the social command. These are the means of support of the Israelites, so they are deliberated pure. The pig is also vile since it does not produce milk like cattle, yarn or hide like sheep so there is