ON FLORIDA’S WATERS
KEVIN MCCARTHY
Are Alligators and Ducks Fish?
When my wife and I were touring Bayeux, France, this past summer, we learned something that I had never heard of before. In the Middle Ages, Roman Catholics became so tired of abstaining from the eating of meat on Fridays that they prevailed on some local clerics to decree that anything swimming in the local streams could be considered fish and therefore allowed on meatless Fridays. Thus ducks, for example, suddenly became “fish” and were eaten on Fridays by Catholics who did not want to eat meat.
Back home, I did some research into this and found a story from New Orleans in which the local archbishop decreed several years ago that alligators could be considered seafood and therefore eligible for dinners on Fridays during Lent, when Catholics heretofore abstained from eating meat. Bishops in South America apparently also decreed that capybara and caimans were also fish and therefore able to be eaten on Fridays by Catholics.
Someone explained to me that the reason behind these judgments dealt with the fact that abstinence from meat on Fridays was abstinence from eating mammals and birds. Because fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects and other such creatures can’t be categorized as mammals, they can be eaten “in place of” meat.
All of this reminded me of my growing up in New Jersey and learning of a new “meatless” product that we Catholics could eat on meatless Fridays: a hot dog lookalike that tasted like a hot dog, smelled like one and looked like one, but was actually made of fish. I remember wrestling with concepts like the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, but I did come to like eating those “hot dogs” on Fridays.
An alligator is certainly not a fish, and it certainly does have meat. But now that gators and ducks have been reclassified as “fish,” feel free to eat such “fish” on meatless Fridays. So even if you want to abstain from meat on certain days, you could eat the ducks and/or the lurking gator in the photo here.
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