BAWDY LINE. The backstory

‘These things only has He forbidden you: carrion, blood and the flesh of swine.’ (The Quran 2,168)

The iterative and anomalous case against the pig in Islam is wholly derived from Judaism. And since it is meant to be the final and unalterable word of God, the only meat taboo in Islam goes unexplained — not made intelligible by a line of patter on cloven hooves and ruminants. Even so, the loathing doesn’t stop at the swine’s flesh — it isn’t just dietary; Islam (and Judaism) abominates against the very organism and the being of the pig, its attributes, its pneuma.

The God of the Jews, in Leviticus (11:1), prescribes an anatomical and physiological formula for animals that are good to eat.

‘Whatever parts the hoof and chews the cud among animals, you may eat.’

As a postscript, Leviticus delivers a homily on the pig. That it fulfils only one half of the formula: it has cloven hooves, but it cheweth not the cud. It isn’t a ruminant, therefore, is unworthy of being a comestible. Importantly, there isn’t any paperwork put out on the pig’s sense of personal hygiene. Not a word about wallowing in its own excrement or eating dung or the parasites in the flesh, etc.

Taxonomically, herbivorous mammals can be of two kinds: those that cheweth the cud and those that don’t. So what exactly is chewing the cud? It is the act of rumination that allows cattle, sheep and goats to digest their nosh, which is mostly grass, hay, bushes, leaves and stubble — herbage that cannot be consumed by humans and non-ruminants, even after boiling, due to its high cellulose content. Because it needs a four-compartment stomach to digest, where the cud can ferment from microbial activity and is regurgitated back to the mouth and then sent back down after a bit of chewing to the in-house yeasts for softening and degradation. That’s how the cud becomes the digesta.

Pigs are omnivores. They are monogastric and can eat anything that humans can and fatten up just as easily. Their preferred diet is actually roots, nuts and grain.

So why the interdict against the pig? It is, amongst mammals the most efficient converter of fodder into flesh. A piglet gains a pound for every three to five pounds it eats. The ruminant calf on the other hand needs to eat 10 pounds to gain one. The whole point of pig is, or should be, to fatten up for the sake of human alimentation. Wherefore the revulsion?

The answer is not in the public health theory of that 12th-century Andalusian rabbi and physician Maimonides, who built his thesis around the pig’s alleged coprophilia. Coprophilia isn’t the pig’s primary tendency. It eats dung when nothing better presents itself. Its wallowing in faeces and urine is due to failed husbandry, when its human keepers can’t provide it with clean mud holes (as would’ve happened in the Levant in the Bronze Age, due to scarcity of water). The pig lacks sweat glands in its skin so it needs a thin, sloppy slurry to roll in to prevent a heat stroke.

Let it be said that all of Christendom, thankfully, found its release from the food laws of Leviticus in three acts. First in Mark 7:18-19, where the late JC Himself declares all food clean. Then, in Mathew 15:11: ‘not that which goes into the mouth makes a man unclean, but that which comes out of the mouth’. And finally, in the Act of Apostles, Chapter 10: Saint Peter has a vision of a sheet full of animals lowered from the heavens, and a godly vox commands him to kill and eat, but Peter is a bit nervous because there are unclean animals on the sheet. The Broadcast repeats itself twice (just in case someone is taking notes) and then, in a huff, makes known the internal processing: ‘What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common’.

One might find a lead to the pig question in the subsequent Christian explanation for the Jewish interdict — since these deicidal people denied themselves this meat, they were constantly seeking the closest replacement, the flesh and blood of Christian children. That was the language and the premise of the blood libel against the Jews. And this anti-Semitic lore was allowed to disseminate, much later, through Poland and Ukraine, areas that were to become the killings fields of the Holocaust.

The abomination of the porcine that can’t be explained by the vulgate of religions should perhaps be seen through the light-gathering lens of literature; particularly, one very long early 20th-century French novel. The author, M Proust, a Jewish homosexual and snob, can be charged with making the madeleine the most celebrated object in all French literature. In À la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), the little madeleine dipped in a cup of tea recalls a forgotten flavour and causes the protagonist to relive his entire childhood.

There is also such a thing as the surgical madeleine. I came to the flesh of the swine late in life, as a young surgical resident in a small general hospital in Maharashtra, and I must admit that the swine’s flesh is the measure against which all others have been found wanting. For me the surgical madeleine was provided by the first ever whiff of pork belly in the frying pan. What wafted was a species of smell that can come only from the singeing of the triglycerides (and myofibrils) of a grain-fed animal. It was the deep caramel salty smell of electrocauterised human fat and muscle that is the habitué of the operating room. So common to the olfaction of the surgeon that it is no longer interesting.

The pig is our surrogate mammal; which is why it was invoked for the blood libel. In Papua New Guinea, where cannibalism was a handed-down way of life, human flesh was always known as Long Pig. Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal, currently serving a life sentence for killing a man and eating more than 20 kilos of him, has famously described in his first televised interview in 2007 how the meat tasted exactly like pork and how he prepared an elaborate meal of human steak in a green pepper sauce with croquettes and Brussels sprouts.

The authors of Leviticus were trying to suppress the most forbidden madeleine for their tribe: flesh that might exude the involuntary memory of early Neolithic human sacrifice and even cannibalism. The prohibition of swine is the prohibition of analogous blood and flesh, one that might be of the same satisfying savouriness, perhaps, as our own. For that reason the summoning of anatomical and physiological difference, of cloven hooves and the four-compartment stomach.

As an addendum, I’ll say that I’m going to request this rather fetching young woman that I know to film herself eating Pork Sorpotel. She slobbers over it in a manner that is liable to bring into being sub-genres in the realm of fetish porn. But that’s a story for another day.

asatwik@gmail. com

(Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer)

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