Clean vs unclean foods

[Cello]

I posted a question about this in the Judaism forum hoping for some good discussion and got not one reply! :(

So here goes again. Anyone have any thoughts on WHY certain foods or items were called 'unclean'? I never really thought about it much to be honest and then someone in a jewish forum elsewhere stated something about pork and cancer and I found it wildly prepopsterous until we began dialoguing more. Now, I'm not saying that pork causes cancer.....I'm NOT. But it got me to wondering about 'unclean' foods and did they ever become unclean....? WHY were they unclean, it doesn't seem likely to me that it was some arbitrary selectoin - any thoughts?

[D. Medvedev Fan]

I've hear it's for health reasons, but I'll see what I can find.

[Sacrificial Ram]

I posted a question about this in the Judaism forum hoping for some good discussion and got not one reply! :(

So here goes again. Anyone have any thoughts on WHY certain foods or items were called 'unclean'? I never really thought about it much to be honest and then someone in a jewish forum elsewhere stated something about pork and cancer and I found it wildly prepopsterous until we began dialoguing more. Now, I'm not saying that pork causes cancer.....I'm NOT. But it got me to wondering about 'unclean' foods and did they ever become unclean....? WHY were they unclean, it doesn't seem likely to me that it was some arbitrary selectoin - any thoughts?
It is mainly a ritualistic thing. NO one really knows for sure. There is speculation that some of it was to stop people from worshipping other gods. For example, not drowning a kid in it's mothers milk was aimed against a religious ceremony from another relgion, where a dish was served of a kid boiled in milk.

Also, another piece of speculation is that pigs are not really fit for a nomadic life. By putting a prohibition against eating pork, you are taking away the temptation for people to leave the group to settle down and
herd pigs.

When it comes to the scaled vs non-scaled fish, the non-scaled fish are often bottom dwellers, so another speculation would be that some of was
you can't eat things that eat stuff that is lying around dead .. i.e. scavengers. While that could be considered a health issue by some, there definately could some kind of concept about not touching the dead from a ritualistic point of view.

All of this is speculation, educationed guesses in some cases, but I don't think there is any way to actually get inside the heads of the people who
wrote the restrictions to be 100% sure.

[luv1another]

if you notice a lot of the food that is unclean is the foods today that go off very quickly and give you food poison if not cooked properly. people didn't have fridges back then and so if they killed a pig and didn't eat it that day within another day or two you could very sick from it. thats one of the things that I was told. I was told a lot more than that but I just can't remember now :doh: I do know that when I was told it all made sense and I went away going wow God is good he even made rules for our own good so we didn't get sick or dies from the food we ate :smile:

[Abigail]

Pig meat has to be cooked properly as it is normally infested with worm eggs. If it isnt cooked properly these are transferred to humans and are quite problematic. I knew a lady once who started getting fits after a car accident in which she had wiplash. When the doc looked into it they found that she had two worms (which the doc said came from underdone pork) in her brain and her body had formed calcified balls around these worm things and because these balls were more dense then the rest of the brain tissue when she had the wiplash the balls accelerated at a greater speed than the rest of the brain tissue and they actually tore the brain inside and that...allegedly...was the cause of the fits.

I also heard that pigs use up a lot more water than other animals so perhaps that is why God didnt want the israelites using pigs.