NegativeNull“Is Fish Meat?” One Justice’s Answer Shows Why the Supreme Court Is So Broken.
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.
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.
homura1650And 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Unfortunately, with Judaism, there isn’t a central authority that can say “X rule is outdated and doesn’t need to be followed anymore.”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.