bookworm

The year is 1956. Your mother is expecting you, and her doctor smokes through the appointment. More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand, the adverts say, and he tells her a few a day will settle her nerves and keep the baby small for an easy birth. The year is 1960. Your first proper shoes come from a shop with an X-ray machine in the corner. You slide your feet into the slot and watch your own toe bones wriggle, green and glowing, while the assistant checks the fit. You go back every time your feet grow. The year is 1961. Your mother is expecting your sister and the sickness is bad. The chemist has a new tablet, advertised as completely safe in pregnancy. Your sister arrives the next year alongside 10,000 other babies whose mothers took it, and some of them arrive without arms. The year is 1964. Three sore throats, so the tonsils come out, as they do for over a million children a year on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty beds, and the promise of ice cream. Nobody asks what the tonsils were for. They were the immune system, and the operation never did much for the throats. The year is 1972. You are sixteen and every car on earth runs on leaded petrol. The lead comes out of the exhaust and settles on the playground, the vegetable patch and the blood of every child walking to school. The men who put it in the petrol knew what it did to a brain in the 1920s. The ban arrives in your forties. The year is 1981. Your mother's hands have gone stiff. The doctor has a new arthritis tablet with the biggest launch the drug industry has ever mounted. Two years later it is pulled on both sides of the Atlantic, with dozens of pensioners dead whose kidneys could not clear it. She gets off lightly: the sun burns her on it, and she spends a summer behind the curtains. The year is 1991. Your father is diabetic, and the dietitian hands him a sheet. More than half his calories are to come from carbohydrate: bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal. His sugar goes up on it, so his insulin goes up with it, and his waist follows. He does as he is told for twenty years. The year is 1998. Your back has gone. The doctor has a new opioid, and the rep carries a letter from a medical journal saying addiction on it is under 1%. The letter is five sentences long. The company pleads guilty twice, and by the second time more than half a million Americans are dead. The year is 2002. Your knees hurt, and the doctor has a new pill that is kinder on the stomach. You take it for two years, the same two years the maker is sitting on its own heart data. It is withdrawn with as many as 140,000 heart attacks laid at its door. Your heart was fine. The man next door's was not. The year is 2008. Your wife has a prolapse after three children, and the surgeon fits a strip of plastic mesh. Once the tissue grows through it, it cannot come out. Australia apologises to its women in 2018, America bans it in 2019, Britain apologises in 2020. Your wife gets hers by press release. The year is 2026. You are seventy, and the new doctor has a screen and a number for everything. The meat on your plate is a hazard. The oil in the bottle is good for your heart. The injection is for life. He is the age the first doctor was when he lit a Camel in front of your mother, and every bit as sure. Not one of them was a rogue. Every one was the standard of care, taught to the next doctor, printed on the leaflet, and handed to a family with no way to check it. You have spent seventy years as the experiment. The results come out after you are gone, under somebody else's name, and the chair you are sitting in is where they recruit for the next one.

The pig was never banned for the worm. The worm was found in London in 1835. Sit on the throne of a small kingdom in the hills of the Near East around 900 BC and you will find the pig was banned for something you could see from the palace roof. Your treasury is counted in sheep. The temple's ledgers count them by the ten thousand, and every one of them is a tax you can see walking. A sheep grows a fleece you shear every spring. A sheep gives milk, a sheep gives a lamb, and a sheep goes where the shepherd drives it, in a flock, to the altar, to the army, to the tithe barn, over the hills to the market you own. A sheep needs pasture, and pasture has an owner, and the owner answers to you. The cow is better still. The ox pulls the plough that grows the grain you tax. The cow gives milk every day and a calf every year, and a bull on the altar is the prestige of the house that offered it. Cattle need land, wide land, the kind only a great house holds, so a man with cattle is a man with a landlord, and his landlord has you. And then there is the thing in the yard behind every hovel in your kingdom. It has no wool. It gives no milk you would drink. It will not pull anything. You cannot drive it to the temple in a flock, because it will not be driven, and nobody in your army wants to march to war behind it. It needs no pasture at all. It lives on the household's peelings, the acorns in the wood, the waste behind the house, and it turns the lot into fat. A sow throws ten piglets, twice a year, and they are bacon in six months. A family with a pig behind the house has meat and lard through the winter and has asked nothing of you, your priests, your pasture or your landlords to get it. That is the problem. The pig is a democratic animal. It is the one source of meat in your kingdom that the ledger cannot see, and a man who can feed himself can afford to be rude. So you want it gone, and you cannot simply take it, because there are thousands of them and they are in every yard. You need the people to give it up themselves, gladly, and look down on the neighbours who do not. Which brings you to the second thing you can see from the roof. Down on the coast are the Philistines, the richer people, the ones with the iron and the ports, and they eat pork like Greeks. Their rubbish is a fifth pig bone. Yours is almost none. You did not plan that; the hills were always sheep and goat country. But it is a gift, because the easiest way to make a people is to tell them what they do not eat. Draw the line at the pig and every man in your hills is on your side of it and every man on the coast is on the other. Identity is cheaper than a garrison and it never mutinies. You still need a reason, because people like a reason. Do not say the pig makes a poor man independent. Say it is unclean. Say the god finds it filthy. Do not explain why the cow, which stands in its own dung and carries a tapeworm of its own, is clean; nobody will ask, because the cow belongs to their betters and they already know better things are cleaner. Write it into the law with the hoof and the cud so it sounds like zoology. Your priests will enforce it for free, because it enlarges them, and in three generations nobody will remember it was ever a decision. That is how the thing is done, and it was done again and again. In Egypt the swineherds were the one class in the country barred from every temple, and the workmen's villages behind the great building sites are knee-deep in pig bone, because the ledger never fed the men who cut the stone and the pig did. Every state that wanted its people dependent has found the same animal in the same yard and reached the same verdict. The reason the modern reader has been given is the worm. Trichinella was first seen by a medical student with a microscope at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1835, two and a half thousand years after the law was written. It is killed by cooking. Beef carries its own worm and was never banned. Goat carries brucellosis and sat on every altar. The hygiene story is a Victorian explanation bolted onto a Bronze Age tax policy, and it has lasted because it is flattering: it makes the ancient lawgiver a sanitary inspector rather than a man who had counted the sheep and could not count the pigs. From the roof it was never about what the pig carried. It was about what the pig gave, to whom, without asking you first.