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     When I tell people about picking mushrooms in the forest, the common reply is, “Aren’t they poisonous?”  Some are, some aren’t!  At some point through time, people learned by experience, when after a few hours they became sick that certain mushrooms are poisonous.  A modern day example of food poisoning is the bacteria salmonella, thus we cook the chicken thoroughly.  We also cook pork thoroughly because of parasites such as trichina.
     An important difference in identifying the cause of illness is, that typically the symptoms of trichinosis become evident from four to 21 days after the pork was eaten.  In the ancient world this time lapse would have been long enough that a person would not have known what caused his sickness.  Further modern medicine did not know the source of this disease until the 1820s when trichina was discovered in an Egyptian mummy which led to its identification through the next 15 years.  This prompts us to wonder how the ancients could distinguish between good and dangerous foods.  Was it only by mere experience?
     When God extended the covenant to ancient Israel, He gave them over six hundred laws governing their lives, including their diet.(Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14).  Although the laws did not regulate plant foods, they were specific about flesh from the animal kingdom, calling some “clean” and others “unclean.”  The law commanded they could eat only animals which had divided hooves and chewed the cud (except the camel) (Lev 11:3-4).  Pigs are one of the specific examples that did not qualify as food under this law, thus were unclean (Lev 11:6-7).
     We now know that pork is especially dangerous as it hosts several parasites.  One is trichina, which causes trichinosis.  Pigs serve as an intermediary host to taenia, a parasitic worm which is commonly called the tapeworm. Pork also supports cysticercus celulosae, a parasite which develops into a worm that sometimes causes nodules on the brain and skeletal muscles.  Pork also hosts the parasite echinococcus granulosus which can cause hydatid tumors on the liver and lungs, amongst other organs.  Another disease contracted from poorly cooked pork is toxoplasmosis which resembles pneumonia.
     Most of the animals designated “unclean” in the Old Testament serve as hosts to parasites that are the cause of diseases that do not occur for some time after ingestion, thus they would not have been readily identified in the ancient societies.  We must ask the question, “How did Moses know to categorize the clean animals and the parasitic hosts – unclean animals?  Was it by the roll of the dice or by inspiration of God?

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