h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a problem with seafood:


to me, partaking of the wild produce of the sea is roughly analogous to taking part in a hypothetical harvest of wild land animals which involved great fleets of airplanes flying over forests and fields at night dragging huge nets behind them hoping to catch a bit of venison and then spending a lot of marketing dollars trying to find people to buy the squirrels and badgers and bears and beavers and bunnies which also got caught up.

And farmed fish are generally worse or no better for other reasons.



And then, of course, there's the fact that I don't really like the taste.

<>

" I'd wondered. They do rather have a penchant for making stuff up."

To which I can only add . Christianity's hardly a geological phenomenon, is it? Where did it come from?

I was told growing up that it was a Catholic thing and it was because the crucifixion happened on a Friday and it was disrespectful to eat meat, so you had fish instead. In Liverpool there is a big thing about families that were able to have fowl (the proximity of Martin Mere made wildfowl fairly commonplace, albeit expensive) and they were considered to be the epitome of poshness.

It's something I actually keep to which I guess, with other things, makes me culturally Catholic.

What's really interesting is that it seems to have jumped the religious divide because a lot of my Muslim students observe it too, having either fish and chips or massala fish on Fridays. The school even does fish on Fridays despite not having any Catholic students for about 20 years.

The Vatican rescinded the rule forbidding Catholics to eat meat on Fridays in 1966.

I have a theory this was in part due to England's World Cup triumph, but I'm having some difficulty with making the connection.

Ah, research tells me that absitinence from meat was a way of observing 'penitential days'. Catholics can now eat meat on Friday, but are expected to substitute other forms of penance, eg works of charity or piety.

I had heard a long time ago that the fishing fleets used to return to harbour on a Friday to land their catches, so the fish would be freshest on a Friday.

Not so daft, them Catholics

In the Bible, just after the resurrection, Jesus ate fish with the Desciples. Just guessing, but that might be why.

I wish I could find the thread from a few years ago where I mildly observed that eating fish on Fridays was a tradition and a Christian thing, and people queued up to swear blind I was making it up.

Anhaga (post 21)-

*dragging huge nets behind them hoping to catch a bit of venison*

You've fallen for the corporate propaganda! The entire seafood crisis could be avoided if we did one simple thing- ban nets. Hooks are very discriminatory and extremely work intensive. Lots of work and a price for seafood that is realistic. As to the taste- it only smells like fish, it tastes like chicken!!

Lanzababy (post 19)-

Personally I think all religion is carp!

When people say something "smells like fish", what they really mean is that it smells like fish that's sat in the sun for so long I wouldn't put it anywhere near my mouth. Fresh fish doesn't smell "fishy".

I'd agree that foregoing fish-eating altogether because of certain methods of trawling which are incredibly destructive is throwing the baby out with the bath-water. It's perfectly possible to eat sustainably-caught fish, particularly if you don't follow food fads and develop monomania about particular fish, like cod.

[I know this is topic drift now, but by h2g2 standards it ain't even *close*. ]

I like to think of it as less than topic drift but rather a kind of freeform branch creation from the original riff.

Or something...

"It's not a Christian thing. It's a Catholic thing"

Ah, but RCs are the 'original' and 'proper' christians (officially, to them, all other christian churches are heretics), certainly in the western christian denominations - not sure where the eastern orthodox lot sit.

But anyway, as such, all the other major western christian churches are in some way a splitting off from the RC. As such, they take some bits with them and leave other bits behind. As time goes on and those splinters splinter further the bits taken lose anything other than the 'because we do' justification of tradition. Thus my family, originally quite conservation middle to high church anglican also had the fish on friday thing and the CofE primary school I went to did as well. Not really because it was a point of doctrine but, well, that's what we've always done.

'It's perfectly possible to eat sustainably-caught fish, particularly if you don't follow food fads and develop monomania about particular fish, like cod.'


But, as I mentioned earlier, whether the fish comes ashore by the method analogous to the aerial forest netting I mentioned or through some sort of sustainable thaumaturgy . . .

I don't particularly enjoy seafood.


Good thing I'm not a Catholic before 1966.

Twaggers



I can't find it either...I remember Della being involved soit was some time ago.

Just goes to show that if you say something and 90% of people shout you down you're not always wrong...unless your warner because it's pretty much 100%...

PMSL

Don't know what the 'Orange Order' would have to say about it Do we really care? Just another drinking club to me

"The expensive meat hypothesis - alright but why not have the "not meat" twice a week in that case, or three times?"

Because the nobles would probably have objected to having to be *too* humble.

Fish on Fridays annoys me. Because it's "not meat", people always try to feed it to vegetarians.

Well eggs are hardly vegetables. Aren't they "meat"?

Now that's one thing that has always confused me, as a devoted carnivore.. Are fish and eggs acceptable to a vegatarian, but not to a vegan

Having spoken to our local friendly catholic priest, it's not that you should eat fish on a Friday, but you should avoid meat. Purgatory and limbo have also changed in modern Catholic concepts and teaching
Not really in my remit. I do have some equally interesting discussions with the Sikh Granthi on his tenets