Everyone keeps making religious connections, but it’s worth pointing out linguistically most countries in Europe (and the world) refer to red meat, poultry, and seafood as entirely separate. Meat often just refers to red meat. English is in the minority to bucket them all under “meat”
Not to mention that loads of people detour through pescetarianism on their way to vegetarianism. But even if you stop at pescetarianism that's still a wild improvement on plenty of metrics over eating other meats.
There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
> There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
Hard agree. It’s counterproductive to have that view, even, and it’s why many people give up on vegetarianism (“I wasn’t able to go all in cold turkey, so it isn’t for me and I’ll revert completely”).
Right? I think it’s a christian thing. There’s gotta be something about eating fish being okay in their bible because the amount of times I heard “fish aren’t meat”
Christians are allowed to eat all food. Only Christ is what saves. (Mark 7:19)
But the fish / meat / etc is a tradition thing, so it comes from the culture surrounding the Christian, and probably more relating to Jewish history more than anything
I was told by my teacher as a kid that traditional Catholics used to believe that if you didn't eat fish on Fridays, you'd go to Hell. I wonder if that was true?
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
"The term [meat] is sometimes used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals."
I think it's just a general apathy in the general population about knowing the difference. "Meat" is pig, cow, horse, rabbit, elephant or whatever, "fish" is fish meat. At a restaurant you could ask if a salad has any meat, they say no, and when it arrives, it has tiny pieces of bacon because "oh but that's almost nothing, certainly not \"meat\"".
During lent, you weren't supposed to eat meat as part of your fast. However, not eating meat is... not as enjoyable as eating meat, so they basically declared that fish doesn't count as meat so they could eat it without breaking the fast.
For similar reasons, they also declared beavers to be fish later on.
Except that's not how it happened. Lent was someting that took several centuries to occur in any form, and what was allowed and what was prohibited varied greatly for long after. Fish and shellfish from the start were allowed more often than things like butter, oil, or wine.
