In the Islamic and Jewish communities of the Middle East, pork has been off the menu for centuries. That’s in large part because certain religious writings ban dining on swine. But long before the emergence of the Old Testament and the Qur’an, people in the Middle East had largely cut the meat from their diets.
Archeological and anthropological evidence shows that between 5,000 and 2,000 B.C., pigs were common in the Fertile Crescent, likely used as “a household-based protein resource”—in other words, they were kept on hand as a tasty, nutritious food source. Then, around the 1,000 B.C., the keeping and eating of pigs seems to have sharply declined. But why?
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Marius Hoppe
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