About a 1/4 of the world’s population has a religious restriction against pork. For other cultures, pork represents a sustainable way to find food independence, apart from empire. We discuss scholarly and intuitive hypotheses related to the reason why the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic and Islamic traditions refrain from eating certain animals. We end with a discussion about the importance of integrating our lives in such a way that ethics, spirituality, and diet are aligned, whatever our values may be.