Haraam

I had lunch today at KOEL- a gallery and cafe combination that seems like it has never seen the real (read: hot, polluted, noisy) Karachi.

As I sat there eating my blackened chicken with alfredo, one of the girls I was sitting with was talking about the concept of halal vs haram – an interesting conversation, especially considering my agnostic tendencies. She was arguing that pigs didn't clean out their blood through their kidneys well enough, and thus made people much more susceptible to diseases- she even cited reading an article about how eating pigs led to some man's brain cancer.

Frankly, I'm tired of the bad rep that pigs have received as of late. Wilbur from Charlotte's Web, and Babe have all been extremely close friends of mine in my youth. Swine flu, higher cholesterol, and increased risk of obtaining tape worms aside, can we please redirect our attention to the pig bladder (aka pixie dust).

Lee Spievack from Cincinatti regrew his finger after sprinkling it with pig bladder powder.
Read more here, and here. Okay, that may have been a slight exaggeration, he'd only sliced off the top of it, and there was neither bone nor ligament damage. Regardless, pretty damn cool for an animal so harshed on.

I direly wanted to bring up the event during my lunch conversation, but chickened out when Alyna's argument that red wine had actually been proven to be beneficial to health was countered with the girl repeating that she wouldn't drink alcohol, not for religious reasons but for health ones. I've learned the hard way that snark generally doesn't bode well when people are blindly religious.