Worried about lag? Don’t be…
My friend Ana Lutetia has invited me to write something about lag on her blog. Since lag was what we mostly got this weekend, I hope you’ll appreciate an update on what I had written about the subject over a year ago.
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Thank you for this explanation! I feel enlightened.
BTW, your pork analogy is VERY wrong, as in incorrect. No, I am not Jewish. 
What pork analogy…?
Well, cannot find it now. I KNOW I read where someone, I thought you, gave the usual sound bite explanation as to why ancient Jews did not eat pork, and that pork is all OK now to eat. The old belief was relegated to a blind, uninformed superstitious group of people. The fact is that pork is still VERY bad for humans. As an ER nurse, I have seen first hand how pork not cooked thoroughly KILLS. Not makes ill or just sick, not a simple case of food poisoning, but KILLS in a slow, agonizing, and degrading process of brain melting agony. I also see heart attack victims, one after the other after the other, DIE due to clogged arteries, or even after living through a heart attack and changing their ways, having another fatal one due to the damage cause by eating things like pork. There were reasons why the old Jews were not allowed to eat swine WAY beyond uninformed religious beliefs.
I wish I could FIND that post!
I know I was up on a soap box there, but I see first hand how the heart and circulatory system is ravaged by pork. I gently suggest using a more informed analogy to fight the rumors of lag.
And again I say I feel enlightened by the info in that post! I am very glad I read it!!
OH WAIT! FOUND IT!! http://analutetia.com/2009/06/22/anatomy-of-lag/
Ah, I see
It's hard to remember an analogy I wrote 9 months ago. However, I still stand by what I wrote, just because I didn't say what you claim I did. If you look closely, I'm not saying that the old Jews in 1000 BC were “blind and uninformed” and thus, due to superstition, imposed to everybody the rule to abstain from eating pork. Rather the contrary — and I'm quoting myself — I'm quite sure that the Jews in 1000 BC were quite clever and observant, and, due to the lack of hygiene, conservation methods, and proper cooking, they very reasonably concluded that eating pork was way dangerous (and as you confirmed, it is still very dangerous, namely, if you eat it raw or unproperly cooked, or not properly preserved pork). But it was far easier to forbid it in the name of God than in the name of rationality or science — two things that wouldn't be very strong arguments in those days, except for a tiny group. The religious prohibition, by contrast, would make far more sense, and would be properly followed too, which I'm sure was the original intent.
The base of several superstitions (this one included) is, like I have claimed, some rational argument that made sense at a specific time and place, and under specific conditions. As soon as neither the time, not even the place, nor the conditions are valid any more (everything changes!), a “sensible rule” becomes a “superstition” if you follow it — blindingly! — without understanding its context. This was pretty much what applies to lag (the subject of that article!) and some superstitious rules that are still being followed today but which only made sense in 2004/5.
I'm sure that with your scientific background you know perfectly well that the problem is not in pork per se, but in the careless way it gets prepared and consumed — or, to a degree, in the amount consumed. Then again, we could use that argument for the majority of things we eat every day…
So, I would be quite willing to agree with you that a “prohibition to eat pork” today would still make sense for the reasons you mention: just because pork is, today, something safe to eat under the proper conditions and with moderation, it's also true that possibly most people (and I'm wildly guessing) have no clue about what those are. In fact, I like to bring out the argument that there is a similar number of deaths from cholesterol than from tobacco-related diseases, but since governments took at least 40 years to start labelling tobacco products as dangerous for your health and funding educational campaigns to alert to those dangers, they might take several decades to do the same for dangerous food products… but I digress