Do you consider fish to be meat?

[Philly]

Hmmmz, I've always wondered this too. We all know that fish is meat, why do some consider that not to be so?

[Xero]

Birds are not meat.

[Kirk]

My mother eats fish but tries to avoid the other meats. She's not really an official "vegetarian" (and she doesn't claim to be one). This is also due to the fact that she's one of those kinds of people who likes getting things naturally, and the fish here is all from the ocean and doesn't have any of that growth crap in it, or any other sort of "nasty" stuff in it.

Isn't there mercury in fish?

Yeah but who actually cares about that stuff. I'd rather eat fish with mercury (natural) than some other artificial crap (unnatural) that they stick in other stuff. Tons of people back in the day ate fish as really their only food source, practically.

[WaywornMmmmm]

Yeah, I didn't know where mercury fell in the "trying to kill you" scale.

[Kirk]

There's a bunch of people that don't eat because of the Mercury content of it, that's for sure.

[RaVNzCRoFT]

Well jews can't eat milk and meat yet! they can have a bagel with cream cheese and lox. So who knows.

The word meat comes from the Old English word mete, which referred to food in general. Mad in Danish, mat in Swedish and Norwegian, and matur in Icelandic, still mean food. The narrower sense that refers to meat as not including fish, developed over the past few hundred years and has religious influences. The distinction between fish and "meat" is codified by Jewish laws of kashrut regarding the mixing of milk and meat, which does not forbid the mixing of milk and fish. Modern halakha (Jewish law) on kashrut classifies the flesh of both mammals and birds as "meat"; fish are considered to be parve (also spelled parev, pareve; Yiddish: פארעוו parev), neither meat nor a dairy food.

The laws of kashrut do not forbid mixing dairy and fish.