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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I get the need to have a distinction between fish flesh and other meats such as beef, pork, and chicken, but using the same logic as in this article, I've always thought of fish as part of the general "meat" category. It confuses me how Catholics do the "no meat, yes fish" thing. Maybe there's some etymological explanation for why our current-day definition of meat doesn't explicitly have this distinction (assuming it ever did), but if there is, that context seems to have been lost long ago. For some reason, many people now just reflexively believe that fish is not meat -- even non-Catholics.
It has to do with old abstinence laws which stated that meat comes from "land animals" and classified fish as a separate category of creature.
And Kosher laws are absolute insane. Fish must have scales but can't be bottom feeders. Land animals have to have specific types of hooves. Can't mix types of fabric...and other silly stuff that might have had a basis in logic at some point but has been lost.
Yeah, as I understand, these were attempts at guidelines for avoiding diseases, because e.g. pork goes bad very quickly.
But we didn't properly figure out how diseases spread until well past the Middle Ages, so that's why they seem to so random...
It also didn't help that in ancient times pigs apparently had a propensity for digging up graves and eating corpses... (Not 100% sure if this is true, but my high school teacher was Jewish and mentioned that as one of the main reasons for why pork isn't kosher)
I think the logical basis was most likely to isolate groups from other tribes. We don't live that group over there. That group over there is trading pigs. It is a new rule, no the law, that you can't eat pig. No more trade. A generation or two pass and the logical basis is lost to time.
And yet Jewish law considers birds to be meat despite having a completely different category for sky animal.
There's a historical reason for this. The main restriction on eating meat (beyond what animal you can eat and various other "prep" rules) is that you can't eat milk and meat. Specifically, you can't boil a kid in it's mother's milk. This was seen by ancient Jews as an abomination and morally bad.
However, you can't always tell what animal the milk and meat came from. If I have a steak and a jug of milk, do I know that the steak doesn't come from the child of one of the cows whose milk is in the jug? I don't know. Chances are it isn't, but better safe than sorry so all meat can't be mixed with milk. (Thus, no cheeseburgers.)
But what about chicken? Obviously, chickens don't produce milk so it's impossible to cook chicken in it's mother's milk. Technically speaking, chicken parmesan should be fine. Except, at some point in history, rabbis got worried that people would eat beef thinking it was chicken and would accidentally mix milk and meat. (I guess people were real idiots back then because I've never mistaken beef and chicken.) Therefore, all bird meat was restricted and forbidden from mixing with dairy products.
Meanwhile, fish was never, apparently, mistaken for beef and do remained restriction free when it came to dairy. I can toss a big slice of cheese atop my fish sandwich with no "milk and meat" kosher concerns. (Well, unless we get into rennet, but that's a different topic.)
Unfortunately, with Judaism, there isn't a central authority that can say "X rule is outdated and doesn't need to be followed anymore." It's a very decentralized religion and this means that there's a lot of momentum to the rules. Some changes can take effect in some Jewish communities, but getting widespread change across the entire religion is difficult.
Are dogs meat?
Fish is the exception because one of the miracles Jesus performed was to fed a whole mass of people with only 7 loaves of bread, small fish, and turning water into wine. Catholics sort of re-create this in weekly mass and the Pope lets Catholics eat fish during lent. It's just supposed to be symbolic. But religion always forgets what is symbolic and what is reality.
We are not a very reflexive species.
Pulling out millions of tons of fish from the Oceans is not sustainable. People don't care. If they don't see it, they don't even think about it.
We willfully blind ourselves in any way we can.
When I was a vegetarian I ran into people who thought meat was only beef… so they thought being a vegetarian meant sure, you’d eat pork, lamb, fish, chicken, turkey, just not beef. Kid of a weird thing to think, since for one a chicken is clearly not a vegetable, but also why even bother to make that distinction? “I have a special diet where I don’t eat beef!” and that sounds drastic to them. Some people’s minds are blown by the idea of no animal parts at all, like “What do you eat?”
I have several Indian co-workers who are "vegetarian" but eat chicken which I have been told "is not meat".
Also, my mom worked for the church and a large number of people would call up every Lent to ask if chicken was meat..
I'm not sure where this idea that meat = beef comes from but it's very prevalent.
Because if they believed "meat" was more than beef, then they wouldn't be able to eat pork or chicken during lent.
People let religion bind them, then try to wiggle out of it whenever they can.
I'm mostly vegetarian because I keep kosher and kosher meat is expensive. It's cheaper to be vegetarian than a meat eater if you're kosher.
That being said, note that I said "mostly vegetarian." For complex reasons (which I'll get into if anyone is interested), fish isn't considered meat when it comes to kosher laws. So beyond some rules like "don't eat shellfish," I can eat fish like salmon or tuna just fine. (In fact, I just made salmon for dinner.)
If I was asked "is fish meat," I'd say that it was. I wouldn't default to the religious description except to explain why I'd eat tuna with cheese but not a beef cheeseburger.
A person who doesn't eat most meat but will eat fish is a pescatarian.
The cow is sacred in India, so they don't eat beef. Most of the Western world won't eat dog or cat, but that isn't a universal thing and while probably not as common today, it doesn't mean that it's an unheard of practice. Until recent times, people would eat what was available which didn't have alternative value.
And then they forget, that just a hundred years ago huge parts of the population were more or less vegetarians, because meat was sparse and expensive. In Germany we had the phrase of the "Sonntagsbraten", so basically a meat dish on Sunday, because it was a special occasion to eat meat at least one time a week.
Some people do legitimately have to cut out all red meat for health purposes, but other than that, this sounds crazy
I’ve heard that the alpha-gal tick borne meat allergy is on the rise, which is pretty wild.
Whoa, never heard of that. Gonna go look it up.
It’s pretty crazy… It’s a disease that you can get by being bit by a tick, like Lyme disease, but it gives you a severe allergy to red meat. I am not sure of the spiritual implications! Ha ha
Also pescatarians.
quoth nirvana: it's ok to eat fish cause they don't have any feelings