Comment by Tangurena2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tangurena2 | Hacker News Reader

> In thirteenth-century England, Christians were expected to avoid meat every Wednesday, Friday and Saturday during Lent (when eggs and dairy products were also forbidden), Advent and on some saints’ days (or the eves of their feasts)

Every person (back then) could observe farm animals had sex. Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin". That's why so much effort was put into catching and preserving fish.

Source:

https://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World-eboo...

Also history of food:

https://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky-ebo...

The author has a fascination with Basques & Basque history. Or maybe they really had a large influence in fishing and trans-Atlantic navigation. And that maybe they discovered the huge cod banks by Newfoundland before John Cabot did.

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

Medieval people were not stupid. They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months. And they observed that people who ate pickled vegetables got scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease) at a much lower rate. The recipes didn't travel too far, so while sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage, with different spices they are wildly different.

> Since no one had seen fish having sex, it was believed that fish spawned spontaneously from rivers/lakes/oceans and therefore were free from the animal version of "original sin".

I don't know who comes up with this stuff.

Aristotle wrote extensively about fish eggs, milt and breeding habits centuries before the Christian era. Not only that, fishermen throughout history were well aware that fish laid eggs.

On the other point, original sin applies exclusively to humans. Animals were never considered moral agents, nor were they subject to the Fall of Man in a way that required spiritual redemption.

> sauerkraut and kimchi are both pickled cabbage

Yes, but one uses Brassica oleracea while the other uses Brassica rapa.

Aristotle thought some fish were spontaneously generated and others not (also all eels and Testacea).

"This occurs in ponds, especially one near Knidos, which, so it is said, on one occasion dried up at the time of the Dogstar and all the mud was taken out; water began to collect in it as the first <rains> came, and at that point tiny fishes appeared, as soon as the water began. This fish was a kind of grey mullet which is not produced as the result of copulation, and its size was about that of a small sprat: none of them had either egg or milt. (...) This evidence shows that certain fishes are produced spontaneously, and do not come out of eggs or from copulation" (HA VI.15 569a13-19, 25-26).

This is something of a problem for Aristotle, since the formal cause appears to be absent in spontaneous generation. He likely would have been happier to discover that spontaneous generation does not, in fact, occur for animals. But he felt that the evidence forced him to concede that it does.

Yes, Aristotle thought this about eels and certain kinds of mudfish or grey mullet, but he didn't maintain this about fish in general.

The fish thing is a carry over from Judaism, which has no such concept of "original sin". I find that a much more convincing explanation.

But his last line was about catching and preserving fish.... Which is the opposite of eating fish. I'm not sure what he was answering

They caught them and preserved them to keep them from spoiling, to eat them later.

And then there were the barnacle geese that, conveniently for Lent, grew on trees...

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

I remember visiting one of the Tudor palaces, and being told that Henry the 8th's diet was likely majority meat, even with all the days it was banned.

> First Course: Cheat Bread and Manchett, Beare and Ale Wyne, Flesh for Pottage (thick broth), Chines of Beef, Venison in Brew’z or mult’, Pestells of Reed Deere, Carpes of Young Veale in Arm’ farced, Custard garnished, or Fritters

> Second Course: Jelly, Ipocras, Creames of Almonds, Pheasant, Hern, Bitterne, Shovelard, Cocks, Plovers or Gulles, Larkes or Rabbits, Venison in fine past, Tarts, Fritter

https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stor...

Honestly it's a wonder there was any royalty without gout.

The Basques were whalers. They started from the coast, using watch towers. Once the Bay of Biscay was depleted they moved further and further into the Atlantic.

Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.

All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).

> the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant

and it was used that way until the second half of the 20th century

Right around when the decopods showed up and the whale went extinct....

Wait, sorry.....that was anchovies

> They observed that pickled vegetables preserved the veggies for months.

Kind of a tautology. Why would they think to pickle something in the first place?

i've pickled by accident before. first time it happens by accident and you're brave enough to try it and you're fine, it becomes something you'll try with anything.

You can ask this about a lot of foods, but probably won't get many satisfying answers. For example cheese goes back many thousands of years, and it's theorized that it was invented accidentally due to storing milk in sheep stomachs or similar.

Probably something similar for pickling. Someone noticed that salted foods last a long time, and vinegar never seems to go bad, so why not try combining them?

What about hakarl? "Rotten" icelandic shark meat. It stinks to high heaven. Yet somebody thought "let's eat this". I can't imagine how hungry they must have been. And, if it doesn't decompose for 6 weeks under sand, it's toxic, so you die if you eat it. I'm sure they knew that. Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.

> Yet they still tried it... Must've been a helluva famine.

Humans have lived at subsistence level, one bad harvest away from famine for most of history. Our modern abundance is very recent (1-3 generations) thing depending on where you were born.

So I think a tremendous amount of food discovery was a combination of food accidents didn't want food to go to waste, and desperation level eating anything to delay death from starvation.

The acidity in many traditional pickling methods is lactic acid produced by fermentation. No vinegar involved.

Looking it up, ocean water has the right salt content to facilitate this...

"Pickling" things in vinegar is a relatively modern invention.

That is not a tautology.

they anticipated liking the taste?

> Medieval people were not stupid

Or at least, they weren’t particularly stupid. These are still the people that reportedly ate more fish because they believed these animals were exempt from original sin because they’d never observed them having sex. Thats not particularly smart either.

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