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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Is it widespread to only call mammals meat? I.e. is "fish meat" widely understood to be a contradiction?

I noticed the same thing :-)

I wouldn't know how widespread it is, but I'd point out this is a cultural and linguistic thing. The quoted researcher's native language is Portuguese, a language in which "carne" means "meat", but if left unqualified means "red meat", and more often than not means simply "beef". One can explicitly say "carne de boi" (cow meat) or "carne de porco" (pork meat) for clarity if necessary.

In Brazil for example, a country of shared heritage and language, even pork is culturally considered to be white meat (or at least, not "red meat") in certain situations.

I believe the word in this context speaks more to Portuguese cultural attitudes, from an epistemological perspective, than to English language usages.

If I look up "carne de peixe" (literally "fish meat") on Google you can find results, but they seem few. To me (I'm a native speaker as well) it sounds odd, though not ungrammatical or paradoxical. Just weird.

Lent is a time period during which Christian believers are supposed to abstain from luxury and worldly pleasures, including fasting of meat. The current cultural perspective is ultimately probably at least somewhat influenced by the fact that in Catholic theology, fish is not included as meat during lent, and may be consumed.

It's okay to eat fish, 'cause they don't have any feelings.

Nirvana

Not in American English. Lobster meat and Crab meat both make sense. The canned meat in my local grocery store has Tuna, Salmon, Chicken, Sardines etc...

But at the same time, you'll find loads of people who don't eat meat. They just eat fish. Try asking a catholic if they eat meat during Lent, and they'll all tell you absolutely not while chowing down on a fish sandwich.

Yet those same people insist that you believe them and not your lying eyes and taste buds, when they call their crackers Jesus meat. I don't think they're using a very falsifiable scientific definition of "meat".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation

>This council officially approved use of the term "transubstantiation" to express the Catholic Church's teaching on the subject of the conversion of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, with the aim of safeguarding Christ's presence as a literal truth, while emphasizing the fact that there is no change in the empirical appearances of the bread and wine.

Is the transubstantiation cannibalism because it claims to be consuming Jesus?

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-transubstantiation-cannibalism-...

"It's not technically cannibalism, because we're just lying about crackers being Jesus meat. And we're not lying, because you can't trust your own eyes and scientific experiments."

There was a whole long serious historical (and hysterical) debate about if or when the crackers stopped being Jesus during digestion, and whether or not Jesus turned into poop, or if you could poop Jesus. (And by logical extension, could you eat last week's poop if you were out of crackers?)

https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/64057/on-th...

>My Question: Does the real presence of the Eucharist persist even after digestion to the point of being taken out of the body by defecation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stercoranism

>Stercoranism (from Latin stercorarius, "belonging to dung", from stercus, "dung") is a supposed belief or doctrine attributed reciprocally to the other side by those who in the eleventh century upheld and those who denied that the bread and wine offered in the Eucharist become in substance, but not in form, the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

>Those who upheld the view that they do change, but only in substance, accused their opponents of asserting that what is presented as the body and blood of Christ is no more than what subsequently is subject to the normal digestive processes after ingestion, eventually passing through the intestines and being excreted through defecation. Those who held the opposite view retorted that the same accusation applied rather to the upholders of the change of substance.

>On this, see the explanation given by the Protestant theologian and historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, who calls it an "imaginary heresy".

[...]

>Karl August von Hase said that early Church theologians, such as Origen (184–253), were willing to allow that the consecrated elements of Christ’s body were digested and excreted in the manner of typical food,

Here's the official talking point:

>In relation to the process of digestion, the Catholic Church's teaching has been expressed in this way: "The substance of Christ's body is not subject to processes of digestion or to any chemical reactions. The qualities of bread of course behave in their normal way, undergoing a change as they are affected by digestion. Our Lord's substantial presence ceases as these qualities cease to retain those characteristics proper to bread."

So officially, the bread stops being Jesus meat once it's digested, before you can poop him. Clever!

We sometimes call fish "steaks". I often eat tuna steaks. So to me fish is meat.

Steaks are cut across the grain of the muscle as opposed to fillets which are cut along the grain. Tuna just happens to be large enough that you can do that.

Cauliflower steaks being a thing throws a wrench in this reasoning.

Also, nut meat(s) is common in the US at least.

the word "meat" is even used to describe parts of a fruit or squash. you could maybe argue that "fish meat" is closer to this usage than its most literal meaning.

Food snobbery does occasionally induce enough cognitive dissonance that fish gets promoted to "not meat," yes. Such faux pas are expected to be politely ignored, especially when serving to distinguish our polite selves from the hoi polloi. You can even get away with pretending chicken isn't quite meat when you can't pretend to have the means to afford a fish diet. For the purposes of social status beef and pork are the meats that are understood to be low class.

This is an awful take. What is “meat” is culturally mediated, and in many places around the world the views are different. So too is your view that beef is lower class than chicken(!)

So some people, “meat” is just red meat. But to still others the phrase “coconut meat” is sensible, meaning the soft white part of the coconut.

“Fish meat” would make sense to someone who says coconut meat, but probably not to someone who wonders if pork counts as meat..

I'm pretty sure the GP was being sarcastic, especially since they started out referring to such distinctions as snobbery.

I don't need explanation. These are my admittedly US centric observations of social gymnastics. They're honest, sincere and correct and I'm perfectly aware that they risk offence among the prevailing audience.

Same gymnastics, as you've eloquently put, can be found in Eastern Europe as well. In my view it's a byproduct of certain meats/animals being in low-supply/high-demand, especially during the previous decade. The resulting indoctrination can be extensive. As an anecdote, I've seen a vegetarian being served chicken, because it's not meat.

Maybe I should have said "mocking" instead of "sarcastic". I believe you were mocking the idea that beef is low-class, and it went over the head of the person to whom I replied.

My apologies if you really do believe beef is low-class, but I really doubt that's your belief.

ground beef maybe, but certainly not the $24/lb ny strips at whole foods.

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