PORKIES

I missed this when it was first reported but it’s coming up now in various places, as just one among many examples of anti-Muslim bias by state and local Republican officials. In 2015, former Nebraska State Senator Bill Kintner suggested that any Muslim wishing to visit the United States should be forced to eat pork, as a condition of entry.

Of course this sounds like complete madness, and I’m not sure that everybody took Kintner very seriously on this or any other matter (he’s now resigned for other reasons), and I hope somebody pointed out that there may be other groups in the world, other than Muslims, who decline to eat pork. 

      Still, you can see a certain logic to the man's thinking.  It’s no bad thing that visitors to a country should throw themselves into the local culinary customs.  So that Americans wanting to visit Britain should be forced to eat Marmite and Spotted Dick before they’re allowed in.  I imagine there would be some kind of field kitchen set up next to passport control.

Anybody wants to go to Japan, they should be forced to eat whale and blow fish.  Kangaroo before they’re allowed into Australia,  cute puppy before visiting certain parts of Korea and China.

I have never knowingly eaten puppy, or even dog, but I’ve certainly eaten all the rest.  Only the blowfish was a slight disappointment.

Above is a picture of some pigs in Cairo.  They're owned by garbage collectors, and they eat garbage from the streets of the city, which I suppose is some version of being free range.  We know that millions of pigs were slaughtered in Cairo in 2009 – the excuse was that they were carrying swine flu.  Maybe some of them even were.  
          The situation keeps changing but I understand the current law in Cairo is that it’s OK to keep pigs but illegal to slaughter them.  And it’s OK to eat pork, if you’re not a Muslim, but it has to be imported from Germany.  I suspect there may be quite a few local pigs who find themselves reclassified as Germans.