By all means people should eat what they want to eat, however vegan is not the right word.
People asking me if I eat fish always scares me because what if someone serving me food just assumes vegetarians eat fish and doesn’t think to ask.
I’m not a fan of people using those terms incorrectly because of that kind of misunderstanding
In France it’s quite common to find all kinds of fish in the vegetarian section of the menu. I didn’t see it classified as vegan yet though.
Yeah. As much as I dislike dogmatism, and vegans eating bivalves bothers me very little, I think there is an actual slippery slope issue here. If you accept that maybe some animals are OK to consume, how and where do you then set an arbitrary line?
According to medieval beliefs, fish are a naturally occurring phenomenon in waterways. They just manifest spontaneously in rivers and lakes, making them not an animal. It was convenient for Catholics to believe this, because they were prohibited from eating meat on Fridays. If fish aren’t animals, then Catholics can eat them on Fridays. So, they were encouraged to continue thinking of fish as just a part of the lake, and that weird “fish are vegetarian” idea persists to this day…