Fish is not meat. It is an animal. And it has muscles. The mammal muscle is traditionally called meat. Science (other than dietary) do not use word “meat” for anything. Just muscle. And dietitians use the same definition of the word meat as traditional. So, saying that “scientifically” meat is just flesh on bones is total baloney, scientifically speaking.
Well you didn’t read the article and/or missed the point.
“Of course fish isn’t meat!” he boomed. “Why else do I—and millions of Catholics—eat fish on Fridays during Lent?”
“But from a scientific perspective,” I responded, “isn’t meat just the flesh of an animal? And aren’t fish animals?”
Scalia scoffed. “You’re telling me the Pope has been wrong for centuries?”
Scalia used the bible and the pope as evidence against science on a scientific question. He could have said what you did, and it’d have been accepted. But he espoused stupid reasoning that backed up his life choices. Fuck him and everyone like him that abuse their power without thought.
And dietitians use the same definition
I’ll be sure to tell my wife, who actually is a dietitian, that she’s wrong and some person on the internet is correcting her.
If you really want to get into traditionally, meat used to also refer to vegetables, a.k.a. green meat. The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general. More recently, green meat might have referred to animals fed exclusively on vegetables or plant based feed. And today, with the existence of veg-burgers or Beyond and Impossible meats, those are also sometimes called green meat.
So take me back a few centuries, and everything you eat would be mete, including that fish.
removed my reduction because - though i disagree with almost 100% of your statement - you are contributing to the conversation. you didn’t say some useless garbage like “this” or “wrong” or “my axe” some such nonsense. you expressed your side of the discussion.
i still disagree. there are traditions that taxonomize bats as birds and whales as fish. these archaic categories do not help us understand the world around us anymore than the ptolemaic geocentric model of the universe. was around a long time. doesn’t make it accurate. but i do agree that meat isn’t exclusively flesh on bones.
“eat the flesh of the olive and discard the stone”
“dry fruits were present before fleshy fruits and fleshy fruits diverged from them”
traditionally meat revolved around the sun and the flesh of fish was the center of the universe.
or you know whatever man.
Again, except in dietary, meat is not used in science at all. So, your point about wrong taxidermy is not quite valid. In everyday use this word does not mean fish. It just does not. Go to the store and look at meat and fish product departments/sections. Also, it does make sense to separate them from dietary point of view - there are also several important distinctions between fish and other types of meat, especially in terms of their nutritional profiles and potential health benefits.
Your argument reminded me of the mammoth meatball from earlier this year :-)
The Catholic church classified beavers as fish for a while so they could be eaten on Fridays. They may not be experts on taxonomy.
Catholics can only eat the beaver on Fridays? Why would anyone be Catholic?
Education is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing to not put them on a fruit salad.
I’m gonna use my food wisdom to devise a tomato fruit salad just to spite this comment.
https://www.stonehollowfarmstead.com/products/tomato-vanilla-jam
I’ve had a similar one. It’s decent with cheese like manchego but it’s strange.
While this has become a popular saying the more interesting portion I found is that science tends to taxonomize by similarity, form and behaviour in isolation. Culture tends to taxonomize by useage and by weight of historical value bias.
Both are valid because their aims are to do entirely different things. One is to make the study of something more efficient and the other is to inform it’s everyday instance of use.
However I find it very unnerving when a judge cares only for cultural precedent and not other ethical systems of determining what is just.
Modern taxonomy is based on ancestory. Similarity of form and behavior are ways of assessing ancestory, but they are no longer the basis of the taxonomy itself.
Perspective is knowing that botanists and dieticians can have different definitions for what fruit is.
…Chief Justice Roberts’ oft-cited remark that the job of a Supreme Court justice is to “call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
The concept of identity-protective cognition helps explain Justice Scalia’s reflexive response to the question of whether fish is meat. Rather than dispassionately considering arguments rooted in biology and social practice, he jumped immediately to his group identity as a practicing Catholic. That identity led him to a clear answer that reflected his group’s moral values and shared commitments: Fish is not meat.
That’s the setup and knockdown.
Justice Scalia
Scalia has been dead for 7 years.
All the current shit going on with the SC, and they pick this to write about?
It’s not about Scalia, it’s explaining the concept of justices making rulings based on their own identity and beliefs instead of facts and logic. To, you know, explain “All the current shit going on with the SC”.
Bribery, corrruption, and buying court decisions are the issues of today.
Personal identity and beliefs don’t factor in when its already bought and paid for.
If they have to go back 7 years to being up an example, that would indicate it is very rare they use only their identity to determine rulings.
I don’t doubt they often ignore science but this article indicates that is not the case. Is there not something recent they could refer to?
I get the need to have a distinction between fish flesh and other meats such as beef, pork, and chicken, but using the same logic as in this article, I’ve always thought of fish as part of the general “meat” category. It confuses me how Catholics do the “no meat, yes fish” thing. Maybe there’s some etymological explanation for why our current-day definition of meat doesn’t explicitly have this distinction (assuming it ever did), but if there is, that context seems to have been lost long ago. For some reason, many people now just reflexively believe that fish is not meat – even non-Catholics.
When I was a vegetarian I ran into people who thought meat was only beef… so they thought being a vegetarian meant sure, you’d eat pork, lamb, fish, chicken, turkey, just not beef. Kid of a weird thing to think, since for one a chicken is clearly not a vegetable, but also why even bother to make that distinction? “I have a special diet where I don’t eat beef!” and that sounds drastic to them. Some people’s minds are blown by the idea of no animal parts at all, like “What do you eat?”
I’m mostly vegetarian because I keep kosher and kosher meat is expensive. It’s cheaper to be vegetarian than a meat eater if you’re kosher.
That being said, note that I said “mostly vegetarian.” For complex reasons (which I’ll get into if anyone is interested), fish isn’t considered meat when it comes to kosher laws. So beyond some rules like “don’t eat shellfish,” I can eat fish like salmon or tuna just fine. (In fact, I just made salmon for dinner.)
If I was asked “is fish meat,” I’d say that it was. I wouldn’t default to the religious description except to explain why I’d eat tuna with cheese but not a beef cheeseburger.
I have several Indian co-workers who are “vegetarian” but eat chicken which I have been told “is not meat”.
Also, my mom worked for the church and a large number of people would call up every Lent to ask if chicken was meat…
I’m not sure where this idea that meat = beef comes from but it’s very prevalent.
The cow is sacred in India, so they don’t eat beef. Most of the Western world won’t eat dog or cat, but that isn’t a universal thing and while probably not as common today, it doesn’t mean that it’s an unheard of practice. Until recent times, people would eat what was available which didn’t have alternative value.
And then they forget, that just a hundred years ago huge parts of the population were more or less vegetarians, because meat was sparse and expensive. In Germany we had the phrase of the “Sonntagsbraten”, so basically a meat dish on Sunday, because it was a special occasion to eat meat at least one time a week.
Some people do legitimately have to cut out all red meat for health purposes, but other than that, this sounds crazy
I’ve heard that the alpha-gal tick borne meat allergy is on the rise, which is pretty wild.
Fish is the exception because one of the miracles Jesus performed was to fed a whole mass of people with only 7 loaves of bread, small fish, and turning water into wine. Catholics sort of re-create this in weekly mass and the Pope lets Catholics eat fish during lent. It’s just supposed to be symbolic. But religion always forgets what is symbolic and what is reality.
It has to do with old abstinence laws which stated that meat comes from “land animals” and classified fish as a separate category of creature.
And yet Jewish law considers birds to be meat despite having a completely different category for sky animal.
There’s a historical reason for this. The main restriction on eating meat (beyond what animal you can eat and various other “prep” rules) is that you can’t eat milk and meat. Specifically, you can’t boil a kid in it’s mother’s milk. This was seen by ancient Jews as an abomination and morally bad.
However, you can’t always tell what animal the milk and meat came from. If I have a steak and a jug of milk, do I know that the steak doesn’t come from the child of one of the cows whose milk is in the jug? I don’t know. Chances are it isn’t, but better safe than sorry so all meat can’t be mixed with milk. (Thus, no cheeseburgers.)
But what about chicken? Obviously, chickens don’t produce milk so it’s impossible to cook chicken in it’s mother’s milk. Technically speaking, chicken parmesan should be fine. Except, at some point in history, rabbis got worried that people would eat beef thinking it was chicken and would accidentally mix milk and meat. (I guess people were real idiots back then because I’ve never mistaken beef and chicken.) Therefore, all bird meat was restricted and forbidden from mixing with dairy products.
Meanwhile, fish was never, apparently, mistaken for beef and do remained restriction free when it came to dairy. I can toss a big slice of cheese atop my fish sandwich with no “milk and meat” kosher concerns. (Well, unless we get into rennet, but that’s a different topic.)
Unfortunately, with Judaism, there isn’t a central authority that can say “X rule is outdated and doesn’t need to be followed anymore.” It’s a very decentralized religion and this means that there’s a lot of momentum to the rules. Some changes can take effect in some Jewish communities, but getting widespread change across the entire religion is difficult.
And Kosher laws are absolute insane. Fish must have scales but can’t be bottom feeders. Land animals have to have specific types of hooves. Can’t mix types of fabric…and other silly stuff that might have had a basis in logic at some point but has been lost.
Yeah, as I understand, these were attempts at guidelines for avoiding diseases, because e.g. pork goes bad very quickly.
But we didn’t properly figure out how diseases spread until well past the Middle Ages, so that’s why they seem to so random…
I think the logical basis was most likely to isolate groups from other tribes. We don’t live that group over there. That group over there is trading pigs. It is a new rule, no the law, that you can’t eat pig. No more trade. A generation or two pass and the logical basis is lost to time.
