Flesh of an animal = meat.
Is broccoli a vegetable? Is corn a vegetable?
I didn’t vote because, as has been pointed out by many posters, it depends on which system of categories you use. Dietarily speaking, the more generalized use of ‘meat’ is starting to be called ‘the protein’. Yes, that could include beans and tofu, but it doesn’t for most people.
I might have voted for fish being meat if I didn’t have so many relatives that don’t like fish.
Go back far enough, and everyone who spoke English considered ‘fish’ to be any living thing that spent most of its time in the water. It was those darned natural philosophers who started hairsplitting that some things that lived in water were mammals, and shouldn’t be called fish, and other things were crustacians, and shouldn’t be called fish, and so on.
Science - ruining everything since 1543.
As I commented in the other thread, I believe that in Japan the culinary distinction was made based on an intellectually dishonest basis. They needed seafood to eat and figured out a rationalization to avoid their religious requirements.
In Catholic tradition (or any other) which may make a similar distinction, I’d also opine that it’s a intellectually dishonest arrangement. It’s like having God tell you to chop your right pinky off, and people do that for a thousand years, then one day decide that, “No, if I just wear a ring on that finger, to stand in for the incision, that’ll be the same thing in spirit.” Because, clearly, that’s what God had meant all along. :rolleyes:
Apparently, gods are morons.
And yes, the muscle of animals is meat. You’re not somehow getting sin-free food by slaughtering a fish instead of a rabbit.
But whales are mammals! (That’s where this discussion began.) So they have meat!
i ate enough fish sticks on Friday to not consider fish “meat.” The English language is not simple…
Interesting. As a son in a Catholic family we always ate fish on Fridays (I still do), separately I considered ‘meat’ to be farmed animals and fish not to be. I dated a vegetarian for a couple of years and always wondered if she would eat fish (as to me that isn’t a farmed animal so isn’t meat).
Logically fish is meat - I see that now - and if a vegetarian doesn’t eat fish I can understand why. To me, animals eat other animals, but you can prefer not to eat certain animals because of environmental and personal preferences. Those preferences can be cows produce a lot of methane, pigs are dirty, lambs are cute, camels stink, dogs have a personality, eating humans is illegal, dolphins are smart, rhinos are endangered, elephants are the most awesome animals ever, and slugs are ugly.
Nah this is just scientists being lazy and not inventing new words. They just took a word that had a similar meaning and used it in a scientific context. As science moves on the scientific meaning drifts farther and farther from the non scientific meaning.
Some chapters from The Way to Cook by Julia Child.
Fin Fish and Shellfish
Poultry
Meat (this is Lamb Pork Beef and possible Rabbit I can’t remember if this book has any Rabbit recipes)
It is very obvious in some contexts Meat means the muscle flesh of land based mammals.
I won’t disagree that in other contexts meat means the flesh of living things that are not plants or fungus.
Because Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday, my public school lunch always had a fish sandwich every Friday. Really good, 1970s style McDonaldsish fish sandwiches. For a few cents more, I could get two fishy squares in one sandwich-- awesome!!!
Oh, yeah- fish is meat, just of a lesser caliber than birds or mammals.
My mother always equated “meat” with “beef,” or any 4-legged animal.
To me, anything from an animal, including poultry or fish, is “meat.”
It just occurred to me that if Jewish people get to say that shellfish isn’t meat because fish don’t have legs, Catholics can say that fish isn’t meat because they don’t live on land, so there.
Cite?
AFAIK, shellfish aren’t kosher, but I don’t recall Jews ever mentioning “legs” as a criterion when discussing animals that live in the water: if it has fins and scales, it’s fair game regardless of whether it has legs; and if it doesn’t, it isn’t, regardless of whether it has legs; and none of that bears on whether salmon is meat or crabmeat is meat.
In Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, written in the 4th Century BC, he includes fish as animals, as well as such things as crustaceans and insects. And humans.
Just call yourself an ovo-lacto-pesca-avia-bovi-vegetarian.
Arby’s thinks it’s meat. Not sure if that’s a notch in the for column, or the against.
Sorry I should have said mammals
Chicken?
Snake?
So far as I know, the Catholic requirement for no meat always allowed fish. Eating fish was not a way to get around the no-meat requirement, it was baked into the original rules. Now beaver’s tails and barnacle geese were rules-lawyering, but fish wasn’t.
Unless, of course, I’m mistaken.
I’m born and raised Catholic, and I’d say that while there are some contexts where “meat” doesn’t include fish (like, say, the Catholic Lenten requirements). So, for instance, if my mom and I are going out for lunch on a Friday in Lent and are deciding where to eat, I might say “Remember, we can’t have meat today, so we should pick someplace where we can get something vegetarian”. And we might then go get fish sandwiches. Or maybe falafel or bean burritos.
But absent any such context (like, say, in the poll in this thread), yes, it’s meat, as it’s the flesh of an animal. So are arthropods and molluscs.
And just to clean up a few issues, it’s impossible for Good Friday to fall on St. Patrick’s Day, and there is no definition of “vegetable” that excludes tomatoes.
You are mistaken.
From here…
The justification given for “fish” being acceptable in modern times appears to be that it’s bland, so you’re sacrificing something, even though it’s likely that the original purpose was to spiritually cleanse yourself by not eating the flesh of animals.
edible plant - fruit = vegetable
Correction: No definition of “vegetable” that anyone ever actually uses.
I, too, grew up Catholic. And I, too, just can’t let go of the idea that fish =/= meat.
While we’re on the subject, the U.N. is encouraging us to consume edible insects to increase the world’s food supply. Are insects meat?