It's still not economical to test e.g. every single pig for roundworms, especially since they do not create clinical symptoms in these hosts and a direct test is rather expensive. But they can pose a significant risk to humans who eat undercooked pork and in the past about 5 percent of Americans were estimated to be infected at any given time. This has only gone down thanks to modern production standards that eliminate or drastically reduce exposure to wild animals that may transmit the disease. Compared to farm animals it's actually pretty easy to contain insects in an environment where they can't get infected with foreign pathogens, since people don't really care about freely roaming larvae.
I've read a medical research paper about the resurgence of some nasty parasitic disease in Israel with the breakdown by religious community[1]. Turns what? The stricter the dietary laws for the community were - the less infections occurred.
And we're talking about sheep here, which is similar in size to pig. There are might be a confounding variables here though, i.e. some communities are mostly urban, others are more rural ones. Or maybe sheep meat is less popular among less infected. Or maybe the animals were smuggled from the "West Bank" which is endemic, and veterinary control services are not strict there if existing at all.
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[1] they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
> they used 4 different religions there, but I won't name them in order to not offend anyone.
Eh? Given the location, I'd assume Jewish (Orthodox), Muslim, Jewish (Non-Orthodox), Christian, in descending order of dietary rule strictness. Not sure how that would offend anyone; the applicable dietary rules are hardly a secret.
So keep in mind the world eats basically European cuisine. It is for this reason that in Paris yes food is great but nothing is exotic because eg Duck á la Orange is known everywhere (and it was particularly exported in the 20th century, and particularly with the Green Revolution). And it's made to suit Europeans, so it seems like the restrictions are lax but actually European Christian diets are baked into the sanitary codes. So like shellfish. Wilbur Wright died of shellfish, and many others, he was the son of a bishop. The thing is Christianity and especially European Christians dominate the culture around food in the West, have tons of cultural export. So they're the default, so it looks like they don't care. But oh man do they care. When they travel they get special bottled water, say.
And it's the most typical thing to have dietary restrictions, for a long time I avoided fish for mercury while eating crazy doses of fish oil, a brain damage recovery diet, Christians accommodated that. It just never came up as a religious doctrine, it's fine. The Christian usually has idk type 1 diabetes, that's restrictions, or is an athlete, that's restrictions, or is a woman seeking to lose weight that's like 80% of women right there, that's restrictions. Bodybuilders are much more restrictive than Orthodox Jews.
Orthodox Jews seem very restrictive, and yes they totally are, but while it is partly because they make basically no concessions, and are part of a powerful ethnic group in America, meaning they have power everywhere, like newspaper editors, practically if not literally all producers, a good share of politicians, bankers, what else...well they also have been a fractionally small highly persecuted (on-and-off) minority for thousands of years.
In agreement, let me cite the exception that proves the rule: Charterhouse monks. Eat no meat absolutely ever. I think do eat fish, so fish on Fridays is a Christian thing.
> possibly to a human giving their best GPT-3 impression.
Also commonly accused of mental illness, you gotta look at both sides of the story.
I guess the reason people are like "no no no no!" is first, truth, second, not being afraid of being accused of bigotry--don't want to be bigoted, but also not willing to err on the side of not being accusable. Just being straight. Then, further you have the act of going through mental illness and coming out of it with a clean bill of health--unheard of. Afterward, hamming it up. I could if desired be totally neurotypical, without medication (I did hear one case of this), n I identified everything that was hosing me. F atoms especially.
But I love my poor beleaguered soul, it's been through so much, why change it?
They don't, but they sympathize. And I did spend every second I could in America, absolutely every single second I could. The Non-Orthodox generally buffer the Orthodox strictures. Like demanding all lemonades they carry have the U in a circle symbol, kosher.
And no problem with that, I am unique in my ability to prove my pro-Semitism. I like Orthodox intolerance of, essentially, being poisoned. They take the heat for a lot of society's pure food and drugs.
That's not racial immunity, it's probably an alcohol-induced "immunity" or resistance.
Visigoths probably drunk much more alcohol than Jews, which is a good disinfectant. In the old times it was even part of the soldier rations in some armies.
Some Visigoths converted to Islam and migrated to Morocco, but even after their conversion they still had a reputation of heavy drinkers.
For 10 years I was a pescetarian, until one time I tasted a beef carpaccio, and it was both edible and tasty (before that I wasn't even thinking about meat as a food). So I started eating raw meat dishes like steak tartar, but I always drunk a shot of something strong for safety, until one day I understood that it's unnecessary.
This sounds pretty absurd and I can't find anything on Google about native Spaniards having any kind of special immunity to "bad pork", specifically pork tapeworm or any of the other common pig parasites. So if you've got some links I'd love to read more.
Not bulletproof but it comes with the cultural norms around cooking pork. In combination the cultural norms and the immunity mean pork isn't forbidden like it was by Moses in the Bible. That was the equivalent of a public service announcement for the early Jews, there was nowhere to say "don't eat this it'll kill you" than in one of the books of Moses. That message couldn't be separate from the Bible, everything was conveyed in the Bible.
But like a Spaniard eating nearly raw pork doesn't die. Extrapolate for bad pork, he'll spit it out if it's bad.
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And since when does your one-cent Google search trump my traveling to Spain in person?
I had thought that pork that was handled carelessly was just more prone to foodborne disease, and that happened to be the case at that time--not something genetic like lactose intolerance. It's pretty recent that Americans are even now okay with rare pork, and that's because improvements in preparation reduced the risk. For that matter, there's nothing all-that-magical about chicken that it can't be eaten raw in theory, it's just that salmonella is very very common.
could you elaborate the last sentence of this comment?
I'm afraid I don't see the connection between innate immunity and service anouncements or writing things down, but its probably me being thick even though I'd like to understand.
Like eating pork that wasn't cooked very well, no problem. Or bad quality pork, perhaps.
In America it's irrelevant, the bacon is pre-cooked to high standards and comes from good sources. Partly because secular Jews eat that pork having no cultural norms around it, just driven by it being forbidden. They're vulnerable.
It's genetic, just like a certain tribe of Pacific Islander developed a partial immunity to prions, because they sometimes ate human central nervous system. It's genetic.
