Kashrut

Reading Mary Midgley on the dietary prohibitions in Leviticus (specifically reading "A Bird, a Mouse, a Frog, and Some Fish: A New Reading of Leviticus 11," in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 110-126):

The listed species are not forbidden because they in any way arouse revulsion or because their nasty habits serve for moral allegories. Rather the list must be read as part of a larger doctrine about living beings, human and animal, and their place in the scheme of creation. Comparative religion shows that usually when gods impose dietary rules upon their worshippers, an animal is not forbidden as food because there is anything wrong wih the animal, anything abhorrent or disgusting about it. Rather, the animal turns out to have featured in the mythology as a strong or talented being which has tendered a service to the god, or in some prehistoric exchange a human ancestor incurred a debt of great magnitude to the ancestor of an animal species. [111]

Fair enough; although her conclusion in this essay -- that we need to read the list of prohibitions in Leviticus not as singling out 'unclean' and loathly animals, but as a kind of photographic negative, a filter through which some (very few) 'edible' animals drop through; and these in turn are a compromise, since the Levitical authors ideally wanted Jews to eat no animals ('...however, the religion of Leviticus was a religion for all the people f Israel, not for a class of devoted monks. It was for practical life. Consequently it is not surprising that the book does not forbid all animal killing', 125). This may or may not strike you as persuasive; but her emphasis on the 'purity' of fertility -- as a central part of God's covenant with the Israelites -- and the fact that it is the most 'fertile' creatures (insects, seafood and so on) that are forbidden under these dietary laws is suggestive.

She doesn't talk about the New Testament, of course; but her point that in almost all religious traditions 'an animal is not forbidden as food because there is anything wrong wih the animal but because the animal turns out to have featured in the mythology as a strong or talented being which has tendered a service to the god' can hardly not make the reader think of Christ. Jews are forbidden to even name their God; Christians are specifically required not just to name Him, but (like a butcher) to scalpel him into three component parts, and eat him up, body and blood. If Jewish dietary law says: eat only these very few animals, the Pauline Christian revelation that all animals could be eaten -- including God. Or more precisely, that all animals could be eaten, but God must be.