I’ve read that in the Middle Ages this was a source of resentment of the Church by northern Europeans. Popes would decree what luxuries were to be given up, and butter was often on the list. This was no great hardship for southern Europeans, who had olive oil as a staple fat source, but for northerners butter was a critical fat source in the spring.
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Oooooh, it’s a long time since I’ve had some of that. Mmmmm-MMMMMM!
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Bee VOMIT actually…
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People have always come up with all kinds of strange categorizations for things. In Japanese the counting word for small animals doesn’t include rabbits. Rabbits are counted like birds. Apparently because the long ears are considered to be like wings. Japanese counter word - Wikipedia
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And in the Eastern Orthodox churches meatless Fridays still apply year-round today. Except on one Friday of the year when the Church says “eat meat, because we are all sinners anyway”, which ironically, because it’s dictated by the church makes it not a sin to most folks, so it completely loses its purpose.
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So essentially, the confusion is that “meat” is a cultural category as well as a biological one, and these two concepts don’t map onto each other perfectly.
This is just another application of the clash of categorical systems seen when trying to translate a concept like vegetarianism across cultural boundaries. The idea “foods in this category are not allowed” is difficult to translate when two people don’t have a shared definition of that category. So you either have to translate the full meaning of the category, or get stuck with cases like this when the boundaries of your categories will just not match.
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My cynical adult take is that schools back then (I was late 70’s) had a handful of entree items they would cycle through, so might as well do the fish on Fridays.
Things improved when I moved school districts, also predominately Catholic. Instead of fish, it was enchiladas. The school ones were good enough that they would have fundraising dinners serving the exact same ones. Until I was in my 20’s, I never saw an enchilada that was rolled or had meat. So obviously, these would be meatless and would be kosher for Catholics. Funny how you only realize these things decades later.
For those of you curious about said vegetarian enchiladas: New Mexico Red Chile Enchilada Casserole – Diaz Farms
More traditional individual serving (and what we eat for Xmas): New Mexican Recipes | Red Chile Enchilada | New Mexico True
Again, a pox on meat “enchiladas”.
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Visiting the University of Notre Dame twenty years ago, I learned that some students apparently wanted the cafeteria to provide meat on Fridays during Lent, because if people didn’t have the option of having meat, then they weren’t making a “sacrifice”.
Legend has it that centuries ago a medieval pope with connections to Europe’s fishing business banned red meat on Fridays to give his buddies’ industry a boost. But that story isn’t true.
Zounds. Did that really have nothing to do with it? Old-fashioned cronyism sounds so much more plausible than one guy’s hand-waving.
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I’m not Catholic but I can always tell when Lent is approaching because the commercials on TV start showing advertisements for fast food fish sandwiches.
It’s as predictable as weird cologne/perfume commercials before Christmas, diamond jewelry commercials before Valentine’s Day and tax prep commercials starting up around the end of February. If you pay attention, you can pretty much navigate the entire calendar around marketer’s efforts to sell us crap.
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I’ve had the generic argument with those who believe “fish isn’t meat” more than once.
I always end up asking “Do fish bleed when you cut them?”
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Not to mention that the 40 days of Lent are counted differently. In the Eastern church, Lent starts on a Monday.
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Category debates are tedious (and meaningless) unless all parties agree on the definition of the categories in the first place.
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Thank you for this thoughtful and informative reply! Being raised a non-Catholic Christian, I’ve wondered about the fish-is-not-meat thing for years, but never took the time to look into it. I’d always assumed it had something to do with the fish being used as a secret symbol for Christ (J/I and C being the first two Greek letters of the word for fish), and … maybe eating something symbolizing Jesus (like with Communion/Eucharist) was okay. Your version is much better!
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Also, ducks. And geese. Waterfowl. Anything thoroughly hosed down, really.
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I think people are overthinking this. The point is that on Catholic fast days (Fridays and lent mostly) you are not supposed to eat anything that is considered a luxury. Fish used to be cheap, what the poor people ate.
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Yup. Salted herring, salt cod, dried cod… all cheap protein staples, that lasted long in the days before canning and refridgeration.
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Plus, for the vast majority of christians, there was no way they were eating meat every day.
Skipping a day they were already going to skip was a very christian (that is, devious) way of being pious. Turning Friday into No-Meat Friday was just a standardization of it. The same way they also abstained from yachting regattas on Fridays.
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Both my parents and my husbands parents are vegetarian but my father-in-law didn’t grow up vegetarian and isn’t that strict about it when he’s out. He calls fish swimming vegetables and chicken flying vegetables.
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“fuck 'em and feed 'em fish”
that said, I eat a lot of fish… all year. not christian.
I fish at least 3 days a week, weather permitting and the freezer is always full of grouper, snapper and tuna. the waypoints marked on my boat’s GPS are labeled “meathole” for the spots where mum and I always hit - and sometimes boat - keepers.
fish is meat.
"Its OK to eat fish/ 'cause they don’t have any fee-lings…
~Kurt Cobain
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Cows are, technically, highly concentrated grass.
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