Why I Don’t Eat Pork

I don’t eat pork. (You probably guessed that from the title.) Not only do I not eat pork, I don’t eat other products derived from pigs, including bacon, lard, and gelatin, or any sort of food containing those items.

Up until now, if you’d asked me why not, I’d shrug and explain: I’m Jewish. I grew up in a Jewish household and went to a Jewish school for my entire childhood. It’s never really been an issue – the same way that not eating insects has probably never really been an issue for most Canadians.

But that’s not good enough.

The religious reason Jews don’t eat pork is because it’s outlined very clearly in Vayikra (Leviticus) that pigs are not kosher – that is, legal to eat. The Torah specifies pigs in part to avoid confusion: any land animal that both chews its cud and has a split hoof is kosher. Pigs have split hooves, but they don’t chew their cud. So even though they’re not kosher, you can see how an error might be easy.

The reason pigs aren’t kosher? Well, that’s a tougher question. It’s often suggested that there was a logical reason behind pigs being unkosher: pigs are prone to host parasites such as tapeworms, and if they or their eggs are consumed in improperly cooked pork, these parasites can take residence in humans. Usually, the person offering this explanation goes on to argue that such a reason was valid only in Biblical times, when people lacked the technology to ensure pork could be safely consumed, and this being the case, there’s no reason why the law shouldn’t be struck from the books.

But this isn’t the reason Jews are prohibited from eating pork. I know because we used to suggest it in Torah class to our teacher, the rabbi, and he would explain that, yes, that reason made sense, in a limited way, but we shouldn’t presume to know the mind of G-d. If G-d meant that it was OK to eat pigs as soon as we developed tools to make sure their meat wouldn’t harm us, G-d could have written that. And why would G-d make pigs unkosher but not other species equally prone to carry disease?

In the end, we were taught, although one can come up with logical reasons for many mitzvot (Biblical commandments), one can’t assume that our understanding of the law is the same as G-d’s, or even that G-d has the sort of reason we’d consider to be logical. The point is, obeying G-d’s laws isn’t supposed to be the same as obeying a doctor’s advice.

When a doctor says to stop eating certain kinds of foods because I have high cholesterol, I listen because I understand the intended effect of the intervention. If a doctor told me out of nowhere that I should listen to ABBA’s “Waterloo” at precisely 1:15 every afternoon, I’d want to have a darned good reason why before I broke out my iPod. We consult doctors so we can use for our own goals the expertise we assume they gained from the experiences of medical school and practice, not because we believe there’s something inherently better about people who become doctors and we should do what they want. But G-d isn’t an expert: the idea is that Jews should do what G-d wants not because G-d knows best and can help us better achieve what’s good for us but because what G-d wants is best, by virtue of the fact that G-d is G-d and, by definition, omniscient and infallibly good. If G-d says listen to ABBA at 1:15  and you have real faith, you’d better plug in your headphones.

Now, I consider myself to be an atheist*, and you can see this in the way that I violate almost every other Jewish dietary law: I eat shrimp, lobster, and other seafood; I mix milk with meat; and I’ll happily eat food without a hechsher (symbol placed on the packaging showing the food is kosher). Heck, I’ve even been known to ignore, say, the chunks of unexpected and unidentified meat in my spring roll or the exact ingredients of a pack of marshmallows. And yet, if you offer me a pork chop or a Polish sausage, I’ll balk.

Probably the most common view I encounter, from both Jews and non-Jews, is that my behaviour is irrational. It makes no sense to selectively follow certain rules from the Torah and ignore others, or to follow the rules I do follow only at certain times. The implication is that I have no reason to go around refusing to eat pork products and (though it’s rarely meant this way) that my transgressions of social laws that are forgiven because it’s a matter of religious faith really shouldn’t be. For instance, it’s normally rude not to even try a dish your host has served you, but if you’re Jewish, Muslim, or vegetarian, and the dish happens to be pork, you’re excused.

That’s why saying that growing up forbidden to eat pork has given me a learned revulsion toward it (which is true) isn’t enough. Lots of people don’t like certain foods; most of us do our best to accommodate them, but we don’t consider it a legal right to be able to avoid broccoli, liver, or spinach just because they make someone go, “Yuck!”

On a grander scale, one might argue, if you don’t follow all the laws of Torah, why should your employer give you time off for Rosh Hashanah? The logic might go something like this: the reason it’s important to give people time off for  religious holidays is because religious beliefs should be respected. But if an individual demonstrates by her actions that she doesn’t hold the religious beliefs everyone else is supposed to be respecting, why should her employer respect beliefs that don’t exist?

The first mistake this makes is assuming that any valid system of belief is an all-or-nothing proposal. Admittedly, religious beliefs often seem like good candidates for belonging to systems of this kind because certain segments of the major theistic religions do claim that their sacred texts come directly from G-d and that G-d demands no less than adherence to every word. But to say that people who hold these beliefs are the only ones with legitimate power to define what their religion means is to assume what’s to be proven. (Not to mention that there are always political difficulties that go along with allowing a third party to define who “really” belongs to a certain group.) There are many different varieties and nuances of religious belief, and it’s no more incoherent to reject some laws and accept others than it is form one’s own opinion about the validity of various scientific theories.

The second mistake this argument makes is assuming that the only good reason to adhere to religion is because you believe in its tenets. Do I consider myself a religious Jew? No, but I do consider myself a cultural Jew. For most people, Thanksgiving is a secular holiday – a cultural rather than religious celebration – but that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply significant for them.

Just because I don’t believe in the theistic traditions of Judaism doesn’t mean that the customs and celebrations I grew up with aren’t important to me. So even if I don’t believe in G-d, it still has deep personal meaning to me not to eat pork. Maybe if I’d grown up observing all the laws of the Torah, they’d have the same deep personal meaning, but I didn’t. So because the meaning I get out of observing mitzvot is based on my experience rather than on Jewish theology, it’s not at all illogical for me to want to obey some laws and ignore others.

Fine and dandy, right? We’ve established that I’m not being irrational. But unfortunately for all you tl;dr folks, there’s still one more important part to the argument. The reason it’s so important to me to show that I’m not being irrational is because I’m trying to show that others have a moral or legal responsibility to respect certain among my beliefs. And I have – but it seems like the way I’ve done it opens the door for a lot more kinds of beliefs than I wanted to let in.

If the only reason anyone has to respect my refusal to eat pork is because it’s personally meaningful to me, then is there any reason people shouldn’t give the same amount of respect to my insistence that I have to eat a vegetable with dinner and lunch? Both were rules I grew up with, but it seems like I want others to respect Judaic traditions in a way I don’t want them to respect my family’s household habits.

Which brings me to the third mistake.

Implicit in any questioning of why people of a certain religion or ethnicity or other group behave a certain way is the assumption that not behaving that way is normal. Normal in the “the majority of people living in this region don’t behave that way” sense, which may or may not be true, but also normal in the “there is no special meaning in not behaving that way”, which is patently not true.

When someone asks me why I don’t eat pork, I can provide a detailed answer (a fact that you may be lamenting even as you read this) drawing on the cultural history of my people, theology, personal experience, and the generation of meaning by action, among other things. But if I ask, “Why do you eat pork?”, most people respond not with an explanation of their own heritage or how it comes to be that they live in a society where pigs are one of the main and cheapest sources of meat**; instead, they usually give an answer based on individual preferences as though the conditions of society as they exist are a natural given (“Because I like it”/”Because it tastes good”/”It’s cheaper than beef!”).

All of these may or may not be true, but they’re no more robust than my “Because I’ve learned to be disgusted by it” answer that I rejected a paragraph or two ago. Just as I don’t eat pork because I’ve chosen to embrace certain aspects of Jewish culture, those who do eat pork do so because they’ve chosen to embrace certain aspects of a non-Jewish culture***.

To put it another way, just as Christians (and cultural Christians) are accommodating Jews by accepting that they want Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur off work, Jews are accommodating  Christians (and cultural Christians) by accepting that they want Christmas and Easter off.

Unless a company happens to have a non-Christian owner or boss who’s determined to find people to work over an important Christian observance, we tend not to think of it the second way, because there’s not much anyone, Christian or not, can do to prevent Christmas from being a statutory holiday. However, having everyone not work on Christmas is just as annoying to, say, a Jew who doesn’t celebrate Christmas as having an employee miss an important meeting that happens to fall on Erev Pesach is to, say, a Christian who doesn’t celebrate Passover.

The reason that public institutions like workplaces and schools should be required to respect religious  customs isn’t because we have a moral duty to respect other individuals‘ beliefs, it’s because we have a duty to respect other cultures‘ autonomy. The dominant culture in any society has the power to enforce its practices on all other cultures; in  Ontario, that dominant culture is white, Christian, anglophone, and of Western European descent****. But in Canada, we believe in multiculturalism – that is, in encouraging persons of different cultures to practice their traditions alongside the dominant culture rather than assimilate.

In Canada, there is a meaning inherent in eating pork – a meaning unlike the one inherent in not eating vegetables with every meal or going to bed at 10pm – that no one is allowed to force on me and that I choose to reject. That meaning is tied into a history of evangelism, forced conversions, and discrimination, and though I may not have experienced those things directly, that doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to have significance.

All behaviour – eating pork, not eating pork, driving on the right side of the road, not murdering people – is based on social convention, not logical grounds. No social convention is inherently more or less rational than another. The best you can do is show that at some level, my goals or my beliefs are contradictory, and even then, you’re just making me choose between them, not showing me that one or the other must be dropped.

* Well, to be precise, an agnostic atheist. I know there are many who say this is impossible (including Richard Dawkins), but I offer this counter-example: I grant that it’s impossible to know whether there’s an invisible, intangible, inaudible, etc. six-foot rabbit reading over my shoulder as I type this, but I know that I don’t believe in one nonetheless.

** Actually, this is particularly borne out by the fact that the few people who have responded this way in my experience are those whose own culinary culture is treated as abnormal in Canada and the US – vegetarians and vegans, people with their own religious dietary restrictions, friends from other countries whose food is seen as “exotic” by Westerners, etc.

*** For instance, I know (and am related to) lots of Jews who do eat pork. It’s tempting to characterize this choice as simply being a rejection of a particular element of Jewish culture, but it’s important to recognize that it’s also an active acceptance of an element of Western (dominantly Christian) culture.

**** Among other things. But this blog entry has gone on long enough even without a list, right?