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If we ate a little better our lives would be a little better. Less fast food means a longer and potentially slimmer life. No meat or meaty by-products means an ethically clean conscience and the ability to lord it over your disgusting, base carnivore companions. If you’re of a religious bent, eating properly could mean saving your soul from eternal damnation.
If God isn’t your cup of tea, religious food laws can either be baffling, stupid or morally repugnant but there are rational explanations as to why the faithful follow them beyond “God told me”.
Judaism kicked off the trend of A) monotheism and B) being funny about some foods. Jewish dietary laws or the kashrut, are passed down in the Torah, specifically Leviticus and Deuteronomy (wait until you see what the Christians do to them later) and in the oral traditions, eventually recorded in the Talmud.
Aside from acceptable technique for ritual slaughter, it lists exactly what is and isn’t kosher. It’s a pretty exhaustive list with a few unexpected highlights. For those of you interested in Judaism, there is some bad news about eating bats. Biological taxonomy being what it was at the time, the bat was considered a bird, and a dirty bird not fit for eating at that.
That isn’t to say that Judaism doesn’t have any system at all. Of creatures of the water…
