рациональ кашрута - или ещё немного о дерьме

[jayrandom]

Эпиграф:

VINCENT
Thanks a bunch.
(to Jules, who's
nursing his coffee)
Want a sausage?

JULES
Naw, I don't eat pork.

VINCENT
Are you Jewish?

JULES
I ain't Jewish man, I just don't
dig on swine.

VINCENT
Why not?

JULES
They're filthy animals. I don't
eat filthy animals.

VINCENT
Sausages taste good. Pork chops
taste good.

JULES
A sewer rat may taste like pumpkin
pie. I'll never know 'cause even
if it did, I wouldn't eat the
filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep
and root in shit. That's a filthy
animal. I don't wanna eat nothin'
that ain't got enough sense to
disregard its own feces.

-- Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)

Из одной книжки, в данный момент читаемой pikitanом и по его наводке (курсив везде мой - jayrandom). Время - первая треть XX-го века:

[...] As a result, in China there was only about half an acre of [cultivable] land for each person living on the land, compared to the American figure of 15.7 acres per person.

As a consequence of this pressure on the land, the average Chinese peasant had, even in earlier times, no margin above the subsistence level, especially when we recall that a certain part of his income flowed upward to the upper classes. Since, on his agricultural account alone, the average Chinese peasant was below the subsistence level, he had to use various ingenious devices to get up to that level. All purchases of goods produced off the farm were kept at an absolute minimum. Every wisp of grass, fallen leaf, or crop residue was collected to serve as fuel. All human waste products, including those of the cities, were carefully collected and restored to the soil as fertilizer. For this reason, farmlands around the cities, because of the greater supply of such wastes, were more productive than more remote farms which were dependent on local supplies of such human wastes. Collection and sale of such wastes became an important link in the agricultural economics of China. Since the human digestive system extracts only part of the nutritive elements in food, the remaining elements were frequently extracted by feeding such wastes to swine, thus passing them through the pig's digestive system before these wastes returned to the soil to provide nourishment for new crops and, thus, for new food. Every peasant farm had at least one pig which was purchased young, lived in the farm latrine until it was full grown, and then was sold into the city to provide a cash margin for such necessary purchases as salt, sugar, oils, or iron products. In a somewhat similar way the rice paddy was able to contribute to the farmer's supply of proteins by acting as a fishpond and an aquarium for minute freshwater shrimp.

Далее приводятся сравнительные цифры смертности в разных странах на тот момент:

[...] Even in ordinary years the death rate was high, about 30 per thousand in China compared to 25 in India, 12.3 in England, or 8.7 in Australia. Infant mortality (in the first year of life) was about 159 per thousand in China compared to 240 in India, about 70 in western Europe, and about 32 in New Zealand. At birth an infant could be expected to live less than 27 years in India, less than 35 years in China, about 60 years in England or the United States, and about 66 years in New Zealand (all figures are about 1930). [...] The skyrocketing effect which the use of modern sanitary of medical practices might have upon China's population figures can be gathered from the fact that about three-quaters of Chinese deaths are from causes which are preventable (usually easily preventable) in the West. For example, a quater of deaths are from diseases spread by human wastes; about 10 percent come from childhood diseases like smallpox, measles, diphteria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough; about 15 percent arise from tuberculosis; and about 7 percent are in childbirth.

Ближневосточные мудрецы просто заранее сообразили, что если человек обнаружит, что на кормёжке свиней и кроликов/зайцев (которые тоже могут питаться собственным навозом) в принципе можно сэкономить, то рано или поздно это будет сделано. А, как известно, "garbage in - garbage out". Так что лучше уж поставить на них глобальный бан, чтоб неповадно.

Был ещё такой хороший рекламный лозунг "you are what you eat" (погрызанная одноразовая ручка BIC, рядом футляр с Parker'ом). Не забудем экстраполировать эту идею на эмоциональную и интеллектуальную пищу. Читая дерьмо, смотря дерьмо и слушая дерьмо, нам просто неоткуда брать хорошие эмоции и ценные мысли.