From a Catholic perspective, at least, there’s no Biblical prohibition against eating meat during Lent (the observance of Lent not yet existing) so any rules regarding it are set up by the Church and subject to change as the Church sees fit. Since the Church allows for eating fish on various holy days when meat is prohibited, there’s no “getting around religious restrictions” involved. Even with the gradual weakening of abstinence requirements, fish has traditionally been acceptable even when avian and mammalian meat was prohibited.
It may be that you were speaking of other faiths and observances, so I was just piping in for the Catholic angle.
That’s exactly what “getting around dietary restrictions” is. Saying ‘meat is prohibited’ and then saying ‘but you can eat fish’ is a cheat. Because fish IS meat and just because the Pope said it isn’t doesn’t make it not so.
Ritual slaughter means cutting their throat with a special sharp knife so that they suffer as little as possible. Fish can be killed by whacking them on the head or with a dull knife because it is believed that their nervous system is to primative for them to feel pain. Whales are mammals, but they aren’t Kosher, not having hooves or perhaps lacking gills and scales since they live in the water and Linnaeus wasn’t around when they figured all this stuff out. At any rate, as it SOP on the 'Dope, someone more knowledgeable than I will be here shortly.
Growing up Catholic, my impression was always that it was a warm-blooded vs cold-blooded thing. So, mammals and birds and stuff would be considered “meat”. Fish and other seafood (and, I guess, snakes and lizards) would not. YMMV.
Another aspect to this issue, though, is that the Pope probably wasn’t saying it in English. So when we are looking at hundreds of years of religious, culinary or whatever else traditions, don’t discount the imperfection of translation. In Italian, for example, you’ve got a much more precise word choice for “dead fish that we eat,” “dead mammal that we eat” and “dead bird that we eat.” It’s not as open to interpretation and context as the English word “meat.”
In our house (we keep kosher), “is X meat” is a practical question, not just theoretical. The answer has a bearing on whether X can be eaten with dairy products, which pots, pans, and dishes can be used to cook X, and whether we have to look for kosher certification when we buy X from the grocery store.
We would use different definitions of “meat”, depending on whether the question is “Can we eat this with dairy products?” or “We have a vegetarian friend coming for dinner, what can we have?”. I certainly wouldn’t serve fish to a vegetarian and kick up a fuss if they said it was meat. BTW, I’ve known people who didn’t eat land animals but did eat fish. I wouldn’t call such a person a vegetarian, but I wouldn’t correct them if they called themselves one, either. It doesn’t bother me terribly not to have a single completely consistent definition of “meat” that applies to all possible circumstances.
Do you consider dairy products to be meat? Eggs? Honey? Those all come from animals.
But the Biblical rules, at least the Jewish dietary laws, don’t talk about “meat”. They talk about “the animals that live on land”, “the creatures in the waters”, birds, insects, and so on. There are different restrictions for each of those, plus there’s a rule that says “do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk” (generalized by later rabbis to separation of all meat of birds and four-legged animals from dairy products). There isn’t a general rule about “meat” in the Torah. (I don’t know about any Christian rules that come from the New Testament)
We don’t really make a distinction between “meat” and “not meat” for non-kosher food (although all non-kosher food is an animal product of some kind). It wouldn’t be a terribly useful distinction- who cares if it’s meat or not if you can’t eat it either way?
I’m with those who feel that fish is meat. In my opinion, it’s muscle, has blood flowing through it regardless of temperature and should therefore be considered meat. Eggs for me are somewhat shady - something could grow from it, but most eggs in the US are not fertilized. I’m not vegetarian, but if I were I’d probably be ovo-lacto vegetarian.
Yes, but what I think Biggirl is imagining (and I find it plausible too) is a scenario where some religious founder-folks say “During the festival of X, we shall abstain from meat” (Intending “we endure hardship by only eating vegetables”), but then this tradition is embellished by numerous layers of workarounds (motivated largely by sentiments to the effect “Man, this sucks, I want something’s flesh!”) as it descends through the ages.
I have no real idea if that’s how it always happens, but it seems that the big three religions all do stuff like this.
My functional definition of meat: Something that is purchased in the “meat and poultry” section of a grocery store, and that isn’t a bird or part of a bird.
Fish is in a different section, along with other seafood.
