My wife told me that this was discussed before, but when I tried searching I kept getting errors. Search All doesn’t work, but when I tried Search Any, I kept getting the message that Search All was disabled.
Anyway, I’ve allways been curious as to why some people don’t consider fish to be meat. I tried looking it up, but other than a web site called “Fish is Meat” I couldn’t really find any that discussed the topic. The reasons that the site gave as to why some people don’t consider fish to be meat seemed pretty weak to me. So are there any strong arguents against fish being meat? And if not, then why do some people still cling to that notion?
Who is doing the considering? If you’re talking about the ancient Christian (now pretty much Catholic) identification of foods to abstain from eating on Friday (or, previously, ember days and rogation days), then we don’t know the exact reasons. On the other hand, the distinction that was made falls pretty cleanly into a warm-blooded vs cold-blooded dividing line: turtles and frogs were not generally forbidden on Friday, either.
The scientific descriptions of endothermic and ectothermic would have had no relevance in the third century, but it isn’t that hard to consider the animals with feathers and hair to be different from the animals with scales or the hairless skins of amphibians. (Generally, hairless people weren’t considered as food in Christian nations.)
If you are looking at some other division of fish as “not meat,” I’m afraid you’ll have to provide an example of what you’re talking about.
(BTW, the Search function is being looked at as one of the culprits of board sluggishness. You can search on different time intervals, but you must currently limit your searches to one Forum at a time.)
To bowdlerize anthropologist Marvin Harris’ work, a distinct possibility - depending on whose prohibitions you are referring to - may well be based on efficient use of available resources when thinking of domesticated vrs. wild animals.
He argued, for example, that restrictions on pork in the Mideast were more likely related to the high opportunity cost of the feed in an essentially deforested area; versus say sheep who eat grass, and can digest & convert it to meat.
Fish, of course, require effort but no “feed opportunity costs”, until you get to modern-day fish farming, so no prohibitions were needed.
A vegetarian friend of mine, or I should say a friend of mine who describes herself as vegetarian, eats fish because she says that she feels it doesn’t require the same sort of cruelty as mammalian meat (for example) - all to do with brain size and type of nervous system (she says).
(BTW IANAV)
I dated a vegatarian in college and she justified eating fish because they had no personality.
>> she justified eating fish because they had no personality
I’ve known girls like that and they also loved to be eaten 
I dated a vegatarian in college and she justified eating fish because they had no personality
“And personality goes a long way.” ;]
Apparently one of the “if god wanted us to care
about this critter, he would have made it soft and fluffy”
types. Hehehe.
-Ben
So, in other words, the only people who make a distinction between meat and fish only do it on a religious basis? I am Catholic my self, but that’s NOT the reason why I’m asking. I’m asking because over the years I’ve heard people argue about this and I’ve never understood why. I’ve allways thought of fish as being meat and wondered why there are other people who don’t.
Believe it or not, I got into an argument with a guy I was stationed with in Desert Storm about this. First, he insisted that pork was NOT meat. It was PORK. He then went on to state the same thing about foul and fish. The only thing I ever resolved from what he was saying was that he was an idiot.
Possibly, the reason that some people don’t view fish as meat has to do with the lack of fatty tissue that you can see in just about any cut of beef, pork OR foul.
Or, it could just be that since fish do not typically live on land, in the open air, it makes all the difference in the world to some people.
Actually, we’ve had at least two reasons:
[ol]
[li]The Catholic definition of meat for those of us old enough to remember meatless Fridays - “the flesh of a warm-blooded animal”, meaning you could have salmon, lobster , or even rattlesnake, if you were so minded, but NOT that hot dog, turkey … or that turkey hot dog.[/li]
[li]People who are vegetarian because they don’t wish to eat animals viewing fish as being far enough down the chain of being or something that they may be bumped off for sustenance. This is a moral reason, not neccesarily a religous one. It may also not be a logical one, but that’s a different discussion.[/li]
[li]Does Opal eat fish?[/li][/ol]
As with so many other debates, this comes down to semantics. You’ve got a bunch of different categories of food: There’s food which are dead mammals, foods which are dead warm blooded creatures, foods which are a dead creature of some sort or another, foods which are produced by animals, etc. A person might have any number of reasons for avoiding one or more of those categories. A Catholic, for instance, won’t eat dead warm-blooded creatures on Fridays in Lent. That’s awfully wordy, though. It’s a lot easier for a Catholic to say “I’m not eating meat today” than it is to say “I’m not eating meat which came from a warm-blooded animal today”. The Catholic is just using a different definition of “meat” than the usual one, and as long as anyone listening knows what definition he’s using, there’s no problem.
Actually, meatless Fridays are still on the books, all year round. It’s just that today, you can choose your own penance on Fridays outside Lent.
[thread hijack]
Ever wonder why McDonalds has the Filet O Fish sandwich? It started with a McDonald’s in Cleveland who wanted something to serve its Catholic customers on Fridays.
[/thread hijack]
Thanks to all of you my curiosity has been satisfied. I got the answers I was looking for.
Thanks again.
I can think of at least one inconsistancy the Catholic church has with the idea of not eating warm blooded creatures on Fridays.
The Capybara, which looks like an enormous Guinea Pig, is ranch farmed in South America, it prefers wet environments so the Catholic church, being ever pragmatic, allowed the indians to continue with eating them by saying that they are water creatures.
http://www.comptons.com/encyclopedia/CAPTIONS/18012132_P.html
They are just so cute
How could you eat one of these these
One more observation if it’s not too late:
While there are various religious and ethical motivations for avoiding meat, many North American vegetarians don’t want animals to suffer. I’m no vegetarian but I respect the reasoning. I’ve studied some neurobiology.
The surprising thing is that few vegetarians can explain which species have the capacity to suffer. This is one of the questions that science can already answer. Mammals, birds, and reptiles can feel basic emotions and other creatures can’t. Without delving into the reasons, I’ll just say that there are strong reasons to be confident about this. To most Western palates this adds up to “fish are okay,” but frogs’ legs and insects are equally safe from that ethical scruple.
Everything that you eat requires the death of something. Death sustains life. Vegetarians don’t want to admit this fact, but I guess I’d have to admit that a tomato has less of a personality than a frog.
Perhaps this personality theory could explain the ban on eating pork, since pigs are actually very intelligent (more so than cows or chickens). Horses don’t get off because of their brains, but from the fact that man hates to walk, except behind a plow being pulled by the horse.
Some Asians don’t seem to go for the personality thing since they will eat some of the animals we consider friends. However, the Japanese may think that you need to cook the personality out and since fish have none: sushi.
And whatever happened to the people that used to talk to their plants? Did they all die of starvation?
People who adopt arbitrary and faddy food habits, to satisfy whatever whim pre-occupies them at the time, often find their decision hard to stick to. Perhaps they don’t enjoy the strictures which come along with their newly-adopted faddy little habits, or perhaps they lack the mental rigour to implement all the ‘rules’. When this happens, as it often does, they start fiddling with the rules and regs to suit themselves. This is when notable inconsistencies creep in, such as vegetarians who eat fish.
So to answer the OP: because it suits them to do so.
The above having been said, there are very few veggies who implement their culinary credo with any consistency. For example, most will wear cotton, even though it involves the industrial farming of small creatures which can and do feel pain and which are killed purely so that we can have nice cotton shirts.
You have some overwhelming desire to feed boll weevils, ianzin? Or are you, perhaps, confusing cotton with silk, which does require the killing of silkworms to harvest their cocoons?
And, while I am quite willing to note that most humans have some level of hypocrisy in their lives, I suspect that generalizations about vegetarians are no more accurate than generalizations about any other group.
I have met people who are opposed to the way that most food amimals are treated, and the amout of resources it take to sustain livestock (for example, a huge percentage of America’s grain goes to livestock, along with the water it takes to grow that grain). These people are sometimes quite happy to eat fish, and they reason that fish live nice happy lives until their moment of death, and that they are sustained by a natural environment, as opposed to one that uses resources that humans could use directly. Some of these people will also eat free-range chicken and beef.
Other people are vegetarians because they think meat is grotty. I count as one of those. I just don’t like the concept of munching through veins and the like. I don’t really care too much about the animals, as evidenced by my nice leather shoes. I do, however, like to minimize suffering, and the idea of leather couches creeps me out a bit. This is not a “moral” argument or even a consistant one, but it is one that I use in my life. It’s much like how you don’t sleep with your sister. It’s not objectively immoral, exactly…but the idea is kind of distasteful and creepy. Some people who claim to be vegetarians for this sort of reason find fish a little less grotty (for some God unknow reason) and consume them with glee.