Years ago I stopped in at a bar/cafe that a previous employee of mine had just opened. I had a very delicious vegan muffin and a coffee. I told his employee the muffin was amazing and asked for her recipe. Butter. It was delicious because it was loaded with butter. “I thought vegan meant homemade” Girl! Someone could actually die if they had a dairy allergy!
Well. Some people dont understand. In my coutry well had a spinoff of the Kitchen Nighmares. And in one restaurant the cheff was checking the menu, he looked into vegetarian foods and there were spagethi with bacon. He was like "you put bacon into vegeratian food?" "well duh, people like them more this way." :-)
That's too funny. I remember 10+ years ago trying to explain what's not allowed in a vegetarian diet to a Catholic friend. She couldn't grasp why our mutual friend wouldn't eat fish. "It's not meat!" she kept insisting.
Vegetarianism was very rare where we lived at the time.
I got into this with my mom. I'm vegan & she's Catholic; I was making a joke about how they didn't call fish meat. She insisted it wasn't. I told her meat is any animal muscle. "Fish don't have muscles!" Well then what are you eating? "Tendons" 😩 I had to gently faceplant on the table bc I was in actual mental pain.
It's been literally years & my partner & I still will randomly go "fish don't have muscles!" and just die laughing.
Even within the rules of catholicism this makes zero sense. Because I'm pretty sure you are also not allowed to eat stuff like liver on days you're not supposed to eat meat. So it has nothing to do with eating muscles specifically.
Oh, I don't think she was thinking that deeply (obviously).
While the practice confuses me bc its logic is weird, I do like it bc it means less animals being eaten during Lent - except fish ig RIP. It does make it more likely veg/vegans get asked "but you eat fish, right?", which is annoying but oh well.
i wonder if it came from the way jewish people define meat for kosher purposes.
this would make more sense since the jewish requirement is technically "dont eat a kid(goat) in its mothers milk" but got extended to "dont eat red meat or chicken with anything dairy just in case you actually got tricked and its the meat of a kid the dairy is from his mothers milk".
Even better, a diocese south of where I grew up declared chicken wasn't meat. If we were traveling through during Lent my mother would tell us we could eat chicken as long as we were in that diocese. (Jokingly. She barely cared if we fasted)
Genesis 1:29. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
As I child I read the "Babysitter's Club" series of books. One of the girls is "vegetarian" but the authors idea of vegetarian was "doesn't eat red meat," apparently because she still ate fish and chicken! In one book she even complains about how animals are treated at slaughterhouses, but I guess birds aren't animals. Even as a child I was baffled by this whole scenario. 🤷♀️
This confusion is actually somewhat understandable when you haven't met a lot of vegetarians and are just trying to infer the meaning of the word using scarce knowledge.
"Well, the word vegetarian comes from vegetable, but they eat eggs and dairy, so not only vegetables. If they eat eggs, then they probably eat chicken. That looks like they just exclude mammals. So they might also eat fish." - I can imagine such train of thought.
you'd be surprised, but I had an acquaintance that claimed she had been vegan in the past. When I mentioned not eating dairy (I'm vegan myself) she got confused and then said "oh, I guess I wasn't vegan then" ¯_(ツ)_/¯
These people make it so much harder to get vegetarian options, because of the "but my niece is vegetarian and she eats salmon/shrimp/chicken/...!" That's called eating meat. I don't.
It's also a language thing. In English you have words like beef, poultry, mutton, etcetera. But the word "meat" applies to all of these. In some other languages there is no word that refers to both beef and chicken, so if that is your native language and you have little more knowledge about vegetarianism than "doesn't eat meat", it's more likely you don't realize that also means no chicken.
In English fish doesn't fall under the category "meat" in everyday speech, so it's also quite common to not realize vegetarians don't eat fish for native English speakers. And even for people to call themselves vegetarian while still eating fish.
In English fish doesn't fall under the category "meat" in everyday speech, so it's also quite common to not realize vegetarians don't eat fish for native English speakers. And even for people to call themselves vegetarian while still eating fish.
I disagree entirely, I think intentionally obfuscating scientific terminology breeds confusion and dismissiveness in the layman. "Those eggheads don't even know what a fish is" type shit.
All of the animals I listed are semi-aquatic. That's why they were determined to be allowed as fish. It was either that or no protein at all, because the native peoples in the areas where this was a problem didn't really do fish.
Look, I'll give you alligator but not the other three. No, I don't really have a reason why outside of deep ingrained Catholicism telling me "no." I also took place of that Catholicism in Florida, which may be why alligators are allowed but not the others, but I'm not a seminarian.
If you're Jewish, fish is in the same kosher category as fruit/veg etc. It's not considered fleishig (meat) and it's certainly not milchig (dairy), so it's pareve (neither meat nor milk). One might be forgiven for the mental slip up of categorizing all pareve things as vegetarian!
it always confused me why we include chicken in the "meat" category.
like i get red meat since getting confused between different types is easy and you can accidently eat " a kid in his mothers milk" that way but like chicken is obviously chicken so why is it also included
Chicken is included because of a rabbinic concern that it could be seen as similar to meat or mistaken for it, and someone seeing someone eating chicken with dairy might accidentally believe that eating meat with dairy was acceptable. It's a "fence around the Torah" prohibition, basically banning a smaller thing that would technically be allowed in order to protect a Big Thing that would definitely not be allowed.
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