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JamieMc
Guest
Well, I figured if I was going to throw something out there I might as well make it a whopper!
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Catholig
Guest
During the middle ages puffin was declared a fish so that people could eat it during lent.
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Hesychios
Guest
LilyM is quite correct.
The Latin church does not actually prescribe fasting normally any more, but in the late antiquity it did. These days it is mostly just abstenance from certain types of foods without much concern for the amount of intake. Not much of an ascetic excercise.
I think these days there are only three or four days of actual fasting in all of Lent and Holy Week combined? I’m not sure about the details. In the distant past true fasting was every day duing Lent except Sundays, which were days of abstenance only.
As for the theory that fish is food for the poor, I have my doubts. The peasants and serfs did not have a lot of extra time to do some fishing, so they would have to buy it. The plentiful cheap sources were at the sea, not in rivers and it was backbreaking work.
My guess if anything (this is just a theory of mine, nothing more) is that giving a general dispensation for eating fish on Friday had more to do with employing the poor than feeding them.
It is usually overlooked that the conversion of the North Lands to Christianity had an adverse affect on the economy there. It probably plunged many into poverty and caused social unrest.
Salted and dried fish from the Baltic and the North Sea could be transported long distances rather cheaply. This was a way of transferring wealth from the south to the north. By encouraging the consumption of fish from those lands the church could easily have averted a major resurgence of Viking piracy and pagan rebelliousness.
The Latin church does not actually prescribe fasting normally any more, but in the late antiquity it did. These days it is mostly just abstenance from certain types of foods without much concern for the amount of intake. Not much of an ascetic excercise.
I think these days there are only three or four days of actual fasting in all of Lent and Holy Week combined? I’m not sure about the details. In the distant past true fasting was every day duing Lent except Sundays, which were days of abstenance only.
As for the theory that fish is food for the poor, I have my doubts. The peasants and serfs did not have a lot of extra time to do some fishing, so they would have to buy it. The plentiful cheap sources were at the sea, not in rivers and it was backbreaking work.
My guess if anything (this is just a theory of mine, nothing more) is that giving a general dispensation for eating fish on Friday had more to do with employing the poor than feeding them.
It is usually overlooked that the conversion of the North Lands to Christianity had an adverse affect on the economy there. It probably plunged many into poverty and caused social unrest.
Salted and dried fish from the Baltic and the North Sea could be transported long distances rather cheaply. This was a way of transferring wealth from the south to the north. By encouraging the consumption of fish from those lands the church could easily have averted a major resurgence of Viking piracy and pagan rebelliousness.
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LilyM
Guest
Try only TWO days for we poor Latins (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) - the other Fridays of Lent (and the other Fridays of the year) are abstinence only rather than fasting.LilyM is quite correct.
The Latin church does not actually prescribe fasting normally any more, but in the late antiquity it did. These days it is mostly just abstenance from certain types of foods without much concern for the amount of intake. Not much of an ascetic excercise.
I think these days there are only three or four days of actual fasting in all of Lent and Holy Week combined? I’m not sure about the details. In the distant past true fasting was every day duing Lent except Sundays, which were days of abstenance only.
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Zooey
Guest
Holy MackeralI can see the connection based on your general discription of the critter, but that still has be going :bigyikes: I wonder what else has fallen in & out of accepted list over the years
I think it’d be fun to know. But like I aluded to before … I love food history.
Thanks for the point of info. It was fun :tiphat:
Try googling “barnacle goose”…In the Middle Ages, this bird was believed to grow on trees, & to live in the water after it (hatched??) fell from said trees.
There is a lovely medieval bestiary online, with a picture of a :yup: tree full of little barnacle geese growing in its branches .
(I find this creature a whimsical delight…I first read about it in a Jewish cookbook).
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amal95
Guest
yep, languages that come from the Latin have this distinction., for ex. Portuguese or Spanish “carne” also for meat and you would say “carne de____” specifiying the animal it comes from, ex. “Carne de vaca” beef, or meat of cow.
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Mintaka
Guest
Don’t forget that the streams and rivers used to run with a lot more edible fish, mussels, crayfish, frogs, etc. than they do today. Also, spring is the time when fish run upstream to spawn. This sort of thing really did impact the average European peasant.
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tee_eff_em
Guest
I call *Baloney! * 
…And *what *do you suppose was the impact on the average European peasant in the summer, autumn, and winter, when he was likewise bound to Friday abstinence…? :ehh:
tee
(Leaving aside the dubious claim of streams and rivers teeming with edible fare)
…And *what *do you suppose was the impact on the average European peasant in the summer, autumn, and winter, when he was likewise bound to Friday abstinence…? :ehh:
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tee_eff_em
Guest
PS.
tee
Can anyone point me to this thread? I’ve looked but so far been unsuccessful to find it. Thanks.
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chlotilde
Guest
This was a wonderful explanation that came from another Catholic forum some time ago. (by a poster named adamd, to give credit where tis due)
Different languages have different “semantic segmentation;” a word can designate a range of things, and while the range of a word in one language may have a big overlap with a given word in another, the mapping of one range onto another is rarely perfect. A big headache for translators. Example: OE “frignan” is usually translated as “to hear.” Actually, it means “to learn by hearing and after having asked.” So much easier just to say “hear,” and in most cases, no harm done, no confusion.
But sometimes the finer points of the categories matter. In English, “meat” means “dead animals used for food” (this is a narrowing of meaning; originally it simply meant “food,” and the Middle English term for chicken feed was “hen’s meat,” which we could easily misunderstand as the bird itself cooked up for dinner). Now, the word in Latin which we usually translate as “meat” has the root “carn-” (as in “carne-val,” for Mardi Gras, “farewell to meat”). The “carn-” root (as in “incarnation”) seems ultimately to mean “red”: cp the obsolete adj “incarnadine” used in Macbeth, or the name of the red flower. At least the ancestral carnation is red.
Comparative notes: Gk “κρέας” and Sanskrit “kravya” meant specifically “raw flesh,” and the meaning of raw is clearly “bloody,” as can be seen by looking at the Serbo-Croatian word krv, which simply means “blood.”
So “carne” means specifically “red meat,” “meat that bleeds.” Fish doesn’t bleed that much, at least not in comparison to a pig (which some say is the original meaning of “flesh”). Leviticus has all kinds of regulations about the handling of blood in food animals, and so the traditions of the Church may owe something to that, in addition to all the sound things you’ve already been told about the association of Christ with fish, the luxury which the flesh of land-animals has generally represented (because it requires the expense of raising it, rather than simply taking what God has raised in the water), and the simple fact of marking off some portion of the week for a practice which has no necessary connection with penance except that the particular day has rules which other days don’t. We still experience it as a restriction, if not a privation.
(I would point out that the deepest, richest symbols are those that don’t have single explanations, but penetrate and resonate into a variety of areas of life, and of history. There is a book to be written on fish-imagery in the Christian tradition, and it will be a thick one.)
Tertullian reflects at length on the reasons for changes in revealed dietary laws, and he makes special note of the role of blood-consumption as a contrast between “the fish of the sea” and “flesh in the blood of its own soul;” this obviously owes something to Eucharistic thinking that was not available to the Hebrews whose texts he is quoting (look at Chapter IV of “On Fasting In Opposition to the Psychics”: tertullian.org/anf/anf04/…m#P1726_505586
Different languages have different “semantic segmentation;” a word can designate a range of things, and while the range of a word in one language may have a big overlap with a given word in another, the mapping of one range onto another is rarely perfect. A big headache for translators. Example: OE “frignan” is usually translated as “to hear.” Actually, it means “to learn by hearing and after having asked.” So much easier just to say “hear,” and in most cases, no harm done, no confusion.
But sometimes the finer points of the categories matter. In English, “meat” means “dead animals used for food” (this is a narrowing of meaning; originally it simply meant “food,” and the Middle English term for chicken feed was “hen’s meat,” which we could easily misunderstand as the bird itself cooked up for dinner). Now, the word in Latin which we usually translate as “meat” has the root “carn-” (as in “carne-val,” for Mardi Gras, “farewell to meat”). The “carn-” root (as in “incarnation”) seems ultimately to mean “red”: cp the obsolete adj “incarnadine” used in Macbeth, or the name of the red flower. At least the ancestral carnation is red.
Comparative notes: Gk “κρέας” and Sanskrit “kravya” meant specifically “raw flesh,” and the meaning of raw is clearly “bloody,” as can be seen by looking at the Serbo-Croatian word krv, which simply means “blood.”
So “carne” means specifically “red meat,” “meat that bleeds.” Fish doesn’t bleed that much, at least not in comparison to a pig (which some say is the original meaning of “flesh”). Leviticus has all kinds of regulations about the handling of blood in food animals, and so the traditions of the Church may owe something to that, in addition to all the sound things you’ve already been told about the association of Christ with fish, the luxury which the flesh of land-animals has generally represented (because it requires the expense of raising it, rather than simply taking what God has raised in the water), and the simple fact of marking off some portion of the week for a practice which has no necessary connection with penance except that the particular day has rules which other days don’t. We still experience it as a restriction, if not a privation.
(I would point out that the deepest, richest symbols are those that don’t have single explanations, but penetrate and resonate into a variety of areas of life, and of history. There is a book to be written on fish-imagery in the Christian tradition, and it will be a thick one.)
Tertullian reflects at length on the reasons for changes in revealed dietary laws, and he makes special note of the role of blood-consumption as a contrast between “the fish of the sea” and “flesh in the blood of its own soul;” this obviously owes something to Eucharistic thinking that was not available to the Hebrews whose texts he is quoting (look at Chapter IV of “On Fasting In Opposition to the Psychics”: tertullian.org/anf/anf04/…m#P1726_505586
But the symbolism of not consuming what Latin thinks of as “blood-meat” is obviously connected with the coming memorialization in the liturgical year of the institution of the Body and Blood: we are in pentitential deprivation of the Precious Blood which will be shed for us. Easter will be celebrated with the slaughter of a spring lamb or piglet. We will consume blood again.
chlotilde
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rwoehmke
Guest
The warm blooded v.s cold blooded distinction actually rules what would be considered “meat.” A warm blooded animal has a metabolism that works to keep its body temperature in a fairly narrow range of a degree or so. Cold blooded animals take on the temperature of their surroundings, usually water. Things like fish, frogs, turtles, crustaceans,and mussels are cold blooded. Warm blooded animals including humans die when they get too far out of their temperature range for any length of time.
Muskrats spend lots of their time in the water, like beavers, and are warm blooded. Down home in Michigan in the city of Algonac, the local fire department would save the carcasses of the muskrats caught by local trappers. They kept them frozen and in the Spring had a Muskrat Stew Feed to raise funds for the fire department. I don’t know if that tradition still goes on or not.
Muskrats spend lots of their time in the water, like beavers, and are warm blooded. Down home in Michigan in the city of Algonac, the local fire department would save the carcasses of the muskrats caught by local trappers. They kept them frozen and in the Spring had a Muskrat Stew Feed to raise funds for the fire department. I don’t know if that tradition still goes on or not.
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didymus
Guest
Does anybody have any citations on this?
Jimmy Akins mentions it on his blog, says he doesn’t know of any official dispensation, but:
I assume the same would go for capybaras.
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Gottle_of_Geer
Guest
Doesn’t this mean that we can have caviar in Lent 
?
Vegetarian haggis & caviar would be really yummy. Especially if preceded by a salmon or sardine entreé.For the bookworms & Classicists in the thread - try reading the Deipnosophistae, by the second-century author Athenaeus of Naucratis (in Egypt). The setting is a dinner party, & it belongs to a branch of literature which is devoted to food
which is why it has 30 pages on fish alone: all sorts of trivia about them, and about all other foody things. (The whole thing is about 1400 pages long.)A taster: penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Athenaeus/1A*.html
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lak611
Guest
That vegetarian haggis sounds so good. There are no suppliers in the USA
. I just wish I could try it, but, alas, no shipments to the USA.
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Ben579
Guest
My understanding of the answer to this question is basically a combination of what Kell and Puzzleannie said; i.e., fish was allowed because it was a major food source (and as we know now, a major protein source) for the poor, which they could get for free from most nearby bodies of water. The Church would not want to deprive the poor of one of their most important sources of nutrition, and by placing this “no meat” restriction on Fridays, it did help to identify the rich with the poor, and hopefully make them more compassionate towards the poor.
Also, however (and this is the tougher one for our culture today), Friday has ALWAYS been a day of penance in the Church from the very beginning, a day in which we commemorate Our Lord’s Passion and death for our sins on Good Friday. As was said by others, “meat” (i.e., beef, pork, lamb, etc.) was food that the poor typically only got to eat for major religious feast days and maybe some personal celebrations (weddings, etc.). Therefore, when the Church said “no meat on Fridays”, it was essentially saying that it is not appropriate to party on Fridays because that is a day when we should be doing penance for sins instead. Now, how counter-cultural is that in our “TGIF” culture?!!
Also, however (and this is the tougher one for our culture today), Friday has ALWAYS been a day of penance in the Church from the very beginning, a day in which we commemorate Our Lord’s Passion and death for our sins on Good Friday. As was said by others, “meat” (i.e., beef, pork, lamb, etc.) was food that the poor typically only got to eat for major religious feast days and maybe some personal celebrations (weddings, etc.). Therefore, when the Church said “no meat on Fridays”, it was essentially saying that it is not appropriate to party on Fridays because that is a day when we should be doing penance for sins instead. Now, how counter-cultural is that in our “TGIF” culture?!!
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Ben579
Guest
I saw some question in the posts regarding what the Church’s current requirements/ guidelines for fasting are. Here is what our priest put in the bulletin on 03/06/11:
“In addition to abstinence (which is required for those age 14 and older), fasting is to be observed by all Catholics between the ages of 18 and 59 years (inclusive). On days of fasting, one full meal is allowed. Two smaller meals, sufficient to maintain strength, may be taken according to one’s needs, but together they should not equal another full meal. Eating between meals is not permitted, but liquids are allowed. Note: If a person is unable to observe the above regulations due to ill health or other serious reasons, they are urged to practice other forms of self-denial that are suitable to their condition.”
Obviously, when it says “one full meal” it means just what would be considered a full meal on any other day, not getting an extra large plate, eating second and third helpings, piling a plate 4-6 inches deep, etc. That’s not in the spirit of discipline.
One more interesting rule applies here: When the Feast of Saint Joseph (03/19) or the Annunciation (03/25) occurs on a Friday during Lent, then the rules of abstinence are suspended. Bishops can do the same for the people of their diocese for other days of special local significance, such as Saint Patrick’s Day in Ireland (03/17).
“In addition to abstinence (which is required for those age 14 and older), fasting is to be observed by all Catholics between the ages of 18 and 59 years (inclusive). On days of fasting, one full meal is allowed. Two smaller meals, sufficient to maintain strength, may be taken according to one’s needs, but together they should not equal another full meal. Eating between meals is not permitted, but liquids are allowed. Note: If a person is unable to observe the above regulations due to ill health or other serious reasons, they are urged to practice other forms of self-denial that are suitable to their condition.”
Obviously, when it says “one full meal” it means just what would be considered a full meal on any other day, not getting an extra large plate, eating second and third helpings, piling a plate 4-6 inches deep, etc. That’s not in the spirit of discipline.
One more interesting rule applies here: When the Feast of Saint Joseph (03/19) or the Annunciation (03/25) occurs on a Friday during Lent, then the rules of abstinence are suspended. Bishops can do the same for the people of their diocese for other days of special local significance, such as Saint Patrick’s Day in Ireland (03/17).
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