NegativeNull“Is Fish Meat?” One Justice’s Answer Shows Why the Supreme Court Is So Broken.
RodeoGoatFish are swimming vegetables, obviously.
nocturne213According to Catholics, yes.
Maybe they got confused by the sea cucumbers…
👍Maximum Derek👍The Catholic church classified beavers as fish for a while so they could be eaten on Fridays. They may not be experts on taxonomy.
Flying SquidCapybara too.
RoundcatWho dare eat a my precious giant judgy gerbils?
stownBarnacle Geese too!
They actually thought barnacle geese came from barnacles in the middle ages. Because apparently no one ever bothered to just watch things back then.
Catholics can only eat the beaver on Fridays? Why would anyone be Catholic?
No no no, they can eat beaver all week long, they just can’t eat anything BUT beaver on Fridays. Scholars maintain that this is the origin of the phrase “Thank God it’s Friday”. I hope you were not deterred from becoming Catholic due to this misunderstanding.
Education is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing to not put them on a fruit salad.
Perspective is knowing that botanists and dieticians can have different definitions for what fruit is.
Agreed.
Never thought about things that way
Why can’t they just get their shit together?
Too much fiber
I would suggest not enough fiber
Moral fiber and dietary fiber are different. Lol
I’m gonna use my food wisdom to devise a tomato fruit salad just to spite this comment.
A tomato fruit salad is a salsa
PiecemakersUnless you simmer it with herbs and red wine. Then it’s gravy.
stonehollowfarmstead.com/…/tomato-vanilla-jam
I’ve had a similar one. It’s decent with cheese like manchego but it’s strange.
Cameli_HostisJust put ketchup on an apple.
vaultdweller013Tomatos are evil though -Source my autistic ass
Salsa is basically fruit salad.
How about a watermelon gazpacho soup? That would be a fruit soup, which when served cold (as it should be) is effectively a blended fruit salad smoothie
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.
Science forms taxonomy based on ancestory. Similarity of form and behavior are ways of assessing ancestory, but they are not the basis of the taxonomy itself.
You act as though there is only one correct taxonomy. Scientific taxonomy is determined that way - not cultural taxonomy. Different cultures and language groups taxonomize things in their own way. Like if you are speaking a native Botswanan language things are not divided by plant or animal it is sorted into
Algonquin language distinguishes animate and inanimate but while plants are generally inanimate somethings like feathers are considered animate.
No one is suggesting these taxonomies should be how we categorize things scientifically but at the same time they are not “wrong”. Being able to accept multiple taxonomy systems as functionally correct is nessisary for being able to make useful judgements. In English a blackberry is culturally a berry. We harvest and use it as a berry and have named it thusly while botanically it is an aggregate drupe. Something that helps us interpret it as something closer to a stone fruit. Hence calling it a berry is not wrong. Just not fulfilling the requirements of every available taxonomy. People who are obsessed with being “correct” often latch onto scientific taxonomy but there are risks to creating hierarchy where there is only one right answer that flattens nuanced issues.
Is a fish meat? The level of adhereance to a single answer reveals the individual cultural bias of the individual. Respecting more than one answer means you can better empathize and understand where that person comes from.
You said “science tends to taxonomize by similarity, form and behaviour in isolation”. I am saying that modern science does not form taxonomies on those bases.
If you are talking about the branch of scientific taxonomy that deals with biology only then yes. But biology is not the only branch of science that sorts things into categories. Chemistry, Psychology, Geology etc. all have different taxonomic principles based in similarity, behaviour and formation. It is fair I probably should have mentioned ancestry in the case of biology as it’s usually the first (and often only) thing people think of when they hear the word “taxonomy” but I admit glossed it over.
Noted!
BEAVER IS FISH, EVERYONE! LET’S EAT EM DURING LENT
I hear rhe tails are actually quite tasty cooked u right.
BlaiddIdk though I love salsa, that’s basically a tomato fruit salad
Fish may or may not be meat, but bumblebees are classified as fish under California law.
CrisWild
Yep it’s to better protect them as endangered species.
KofuYeah but its still stupid that they had to do that to get protection.
XLRV“You ain’t a fish, sorry can’t protect you”
Can we now claim that it’s a type of fish that are the world’s best pollinators?
I see it as a clever way to circumvent the dumb bureaucracy BS that might otherwise inhibit their ability to protect them.
They could try to rework the system in place, and spend however many months or years working through that process, or they could slap some duct tape on there in the meantime AND look to rework the system.
Yeah its clever but it’s still a dumb thing to have to do. Got to praise the legal team representing the bee fish public at large. The system is broken i think its putting duct tape on duck tape at this point.
And bumblebees in particular are in a bad spot, for a variety of mysterious reasons.
Why you gotta do my bro-bees like that? :'-(
See kids, this is why composition is better than inheritance.
I really enjoyed reading this article, thank you for sharing it :)
I thought it was a great read as well. I’m glad you enjoyed!
snarfI 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.
cruspies
DharkStareIt has to do with old abstinence laws which stated that meat comes from “land animals” and classified fish as a separate category of creature.
NeatoAnd 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…
EccitazeIt also didn’t help that in ancient times pigs apparently had a propensity for digging up graves and eating corpses… (Not 100% sure if this is true, but my high school teacher was Jewish and mentioned that as one of the main reasons for why pork isn’t kosher)
At the time of these religions being formed the Middle East was being rapidly urbanized and deforested and had desertification issues as a result. Pigs seek shade in hot days and water but if given no other option they will follow in just mud and their own filth. Clearly many other cultures didn’t run in to these problems like in China pigs were held in good regard for helping to clean streets in ancient Chinese cities.
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.
Are dogs meat?
And yet Jewish law considers birds to be meat despite having a completely different category for sky animal.
TechyDadThere’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.
Also pescatarians.
squibletWhen 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?”