Rabbit Hole

My husband apparently brought back a trypanosoma infection from his six-month tour of duty in Saudi Arabia.

I reread that piece on this site recently. It's had me going down a rabbit hole I haven't pursued before.

As noted in a recent blog post, cystic fibrosis is common in ethnic Jews. People who are ethnically Jewish have high rates of alleles for a number of serious genetic disorders, cystic fibrosis being one of them, so I have in the past taken a very small interest in kosher foods.

When I was homeless in San Diego, the Ralph's grocery store there had a kosher deli in addition to its regular deli. I was told it was the only Ralph's with a kosher deli and I sometimes bought food from their kosher deli.

My general understanding is that kosher foods are generally prepared in a way that is cleaner than some food practices. I have also heard the expression "do not boil a calf in its mother's milk" which I interpret to mean "don't mix high iron and high calcium foods -- this is a bad thing."

But, having recently reread that piece, I looked up halal foods, which is the Islamic version of what foods are acceptable.

TIL that Bismillah -- a word that appears in the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody -- is Arabic for "In the name of Allah".

I'm neither Jewish nor Muslim and I don't pretend to know a lot about either one. Here are some general thoughts on Kosher, Halal and an assortment of rambling things that my mind sees as related for whatever reason.

Both kosher and halal forbid pork. Cool. I have never liked pork.

My mother is German and pork is a big part of German cuisine. I grew up in a household where schnitzel (breaded pork chops) was served and my mother once told me that Goulash is traditionally half beef and half pork, though she made it with all beef.

I think she probably made it half and half at one time but stopped, probably because of me.

I was a picky eater growing up and I think my mother figured out I don't like pork because the older I got, the more she served beef and the less she served pork. She spent part of her childhood in a war zone and I was a bag of bones as a child. If you are a bag of bones, my mom is going to try to get you to EAT.

Anyway, I generally tend to avoid eating pork but there are two exceptions to that: I'm fine with pepperoni pizza and I have a history of liking crispy bacon.

I would eat a lot LESS pepperoni if my living arrangements were different. I share family meals with my sons and they eat a lot more meat than I do, so I end up eating pepperoni pizza by default more regularly than I would like if it were just up to me and money were no object.

My sons are one-quarter Norwegian. I haven't looked into the history of the Vikings -- that's not MY history -- but my sons have because it is THEIR history.

From what I gather from talking to them, Norwegians (Vikings) ate a lot of meat because they had trouble learning to farm and some of the animals in the ocean that far north are poisonous.

It's hard to figure out farming in such a harsh climate. It doesn't give you a lot of latitude for making mistakes and still growing enough to eat. So apparently their tradition of going aviking and bringing back loot, sometimes including wives, meant that they gradually imported established agricultural knowledge from other cultures and eventually figured out farming, but it took a while.

So their traditional diet looked sort of like the Eskimo diet. It's very meat-centered.

My sons and their father can both eat a LOT more meat in a meal than I can. I just cannot do what they do in that regard. I need more carbs and veggies.

Anyway, getting back to pepperoni and bacon, the only pork I really find acceptable.

Pepperoni is not just pork. It's a mixture of beef and pork. That may help explain part of why it's tolerable to me if I don't eat it too often.

Humorously, the reason I know pepperoni is partly pork is because of a conversation I had in my youth with a foreign college student who was Muslim. He declined to eat any of the pizza we had at some event because it was Ramadan, so he was forbidden from eating during the day. We talked and he said "I don't know if I can eat pepperoni. I don't know if it contains pork." and I suggested he look at the ingredients on a package of pepperoni at a grocery store, which I then did myself out of curiosity shortly thereafter.

In my teens and early twenties, I read a series of books about the works of Edgar Cayce, a famous American psychic from the early 1900s whose psychic readings tended to mostly be medical advice for people failing to find solutions for their problems. He once said "Don't eat pork -- except for very crispy bacon sometimes. That's okay."

So I'm okay with the fact that I do not like pork, though I will eat bacon. There are two major religions and a psychic that all agree pork is not a good thing and the psychic says "Eh, it's okay to have very crispy bacon sometimes." and that happens to be how I like my bacon.

Go ahead and laugh about me taking advice from a psychic, but if you have pins holding you together, you can thank Edgar Cayce for that. He had a client who had a broken bone that would not heal and he told them "Use a screw to hold the two pieces of bone together" so that's where that modern medical practice started.

I eat less bacon as I grow healthier. I can't recall the last time I had bacon. It is a fat I tolerate well and that was a big deal for a time, though it's high in either nitrates or nitrites and those are hard on the lungs. Having largely remedied my deficit of fat, I don't really need to regularly eat something that's hard on my lungs, lungs being a big issue with CF.

Pigs are basically garbage scows. They eat just about anything. Their meat is probably not healthy.

Kosher tradition also forbids the eating of hares. And it turns out you can die from something called Rabbit Starvation (aka protein poisoning) if you eat too much rabbit. So good call there.

According to another source about halal foods: Other forms of protein that are forbidden are carnivorous animals, birds of prey, and land animals without external ears.

Not eating carnivorous animals and birds of prey (another form of carnivorous animal) fits with what I have said elsewhere on this site about Eating Cleaner.

The further you go up the food chain, the more environmental toxins, like pesticides, concentrate in the fats of animals. In other words, herbivores have more pesticides (et al) than plants, animals that eat herbivores have more pesticides than herbivores and animals that eat omnivores or carnivores will be more toxic still.

So one easy way to eat cleaner is to eat less meat, fish and dairy.

I eat a semi-vegetarian diet in part for that reason and when I do eat meat -- especially beef -- I'm very picky about quality. And from what I gather both kosher and halal rules are big on meat being clean, from an animal free of defects, etc.

Both also emphasize the importance of killing the animal in a way that isn't distressing to the animal and there are rules about how to do that.

I talked to someone once who is not religious but is very sciency and they commented "Well, if an animal dies in a state of distress, the meat will be tinged with various chemicals from the animal having a physiological reaction to the stress. So that makes perfect sense as a best practice for making sure the meat is good quality."

Both kosher and halal rules forbid consuming animal blood and blood products. This brings me to part of why I am writing this post: Having recently reread the post quoted at the start of this piece, I am thinking that the reason the Middle East is not really known as a place with trypanosomas is because of Islam.

Trypanosomas can live in the skin and that form has historically been overlooked from what I gather as it's especially hard to find, but -- like malaria -- trypanosomas is primarily known as a blood-borne disease. In my experience, cutting off hair and fasting can help control it, so I am thinking that perhaps fasting during Ramadan, removal of body hair that I have heard is a Muslim tradition and some of the halal rules are about keeping trypanosomas under control in a population where it may be a fairly common infection.

So I am thinking some of the strict religious rules in that region serve the same purpose as some of my diet and lifestyle choices: To treat trypanosomas, an infection doctors don't currently know how to cure.

Islam also forbids alcohol, though there is a humorous scene in The Thirteenth Warrior where the Middle Eastern guy is told mead is made from fermented honey and somehow that is apparently a loophole, so he drinks it.

My mother doesn't drink. My dad drank heavily at one time, though mostly before my time. So I grew up in a household where personal preference in that regard was respected, which does not seem to be the norm. Most people seem to be very judgy about alcohol and either they don't drink and don't want to be around drinkers or they do drink and want to convince you to join them.

I also grew up in a household where we rarely had alcohol in the house. My dad retired from the Army when I was three and I think he tapered off because he no longer needed it to suppress his nightmares from serving in the front lines of two wars.

When I was seven, he was diagnosed with a heart condition. He blamed it on his drinking and officially swore off, but he had already basically quit drinking by then. The stories of his legendary drinking sprees were all stories to me from when he was in the Army. It was not something I ever witnessed.

For American audiences, I tend to emphasize that I don't tolerate alcohol well. I can drink Kahlua, a coffee-based liqueur, but even then I like it to be part of an iced drink because that way my tongue goes numb and I barely taste it.

I don't have a bad reaction to Kahlua the way I do to most alcohols that I have tried, but I still don't like the taste of it. I am generally trying to tell drinkers "You do you and let ME DO ME and don't try to talk me into drinking and I won't try to talk you out of it. Kaythxbai."

I'm a closet critic of alcohol. I take that position publicly to try to get people off my back.

In reality, I don't think drinking alcohol is generally a good thing. Most date rape involves alcohol, which most people don't want to hear, and alcohol has been called "The number one rape drug." Additionally, lots of studies show it's got a lot of terrible health effects.

Having said that, I did drink the equivalent of two to four servings of alcohol a night most nights for roughly a year when I was fighting for my life. It helped me sleep nights, probably by beating back my infections.

As I found other things that worked, I stopped drinking -- because I've never liked it.

So I stand by my "You do you" position of trying to butt out of the choices of other people. Maybe some folks who drink are treating undiagnosed medical conditions, perhaps without consciously realizing it. Or, like my dad, suppressing nightmares for some reason so they can sleep at all.

Historically, it was common for men to work physically hard and stop at the pub on the way home and have a beer or two. It helped ease their aches and pains so they could sleep nights in a world where hard physical labor was much more common than desk jobs and we didn't yet have a lot of OTC pain killers and the like.

So I think context matters and it's one of the reasons I default to "I don't like alcohol, but I don't want to be too judgy about it."