Science Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris is doing that provocatively simple thing he does best: making a taboo look like a cost-benefit spreadsheet. The line pretends to be an innocent observation about forestry and pig husbandry, but the real target is the moral romance we attach to food rules. He’s saying: start with ecology, and you can predict culture.

The intent is comparative and slightly corrective. “Here” (the forested, temperate world) becomes a stage where pigs are practical: they can forage, convert scraps and mast into meat, and do it without competing directly with humans for scarce grain. That material ease breeds familiarity, then affection, then pork as normal. The Middle East, by contrast, is invoked as an environment where pigs are costly: in hot, arid zones they can’t sweat, need shade and water, and don’t browse like goats or camels. If raising them means feeding them human-edible calories and precious water, the animal stops being “cute” and starts being a bad investment. Over time, “bad investment” hardens into “unclean,” and the rule acquires spiritual authority.

The subtext is classic cultural materialism: beliefs aren’t free-floating ideas; they’re adaptive stories that stick because they solve problems. Harris also smuggles in a critique of Western smugness. If you think other people avoid pork because they’re irrational or puritanical, he’s offering a cooler, more unsettling alternative: your own “attitude” is just as contingent, just backed by different landscapes and supply chains.

Contextually, this sits in Harris’s broader project of explaining religion and taboo through infrastructure - climate, calories, labor - insisting that what feels eternal often began as logistics.