Fish, Fridays and Fasting

Roman Catholics and some other western Christians have traditionally eaten fish and other seafood during Lent, on Fridays, and at other times regarded as days of abstinence. Eastern orthodox Christians have more exacting rules for Lent which exclude fin fish, but allow crustaceans and molluscs. Oddly therefore such fasting rules have given rise to some delicious dishes for times of abstinence.

Such customs have led to some confusion or cynicism among modern observers, and some participants. The web yields a range of poor-quality "common sense" explanations about seafood as fasting fare, but the real origins of the idea lie in ancient understandings of sacrifice.

In the ancient Mediterranean meat was expensive, as in agrarian societies generally, but also often laden with religious significance. Greek and Roman religion, and of course Judaism too, valued the ritual killing of animals. Unless destroyed in the sacrificial process, the meat of victims was consumed by the household offering the animal, along with their friends and associates (and priests), and the surplus sold on to markets.

Meanwhile, fish was not really a cheaper or less valued food. Only wealthy people ate either meat or fish regularly. There were also various forms of preserved fish, and sauces or relishes derived from fish, that were widely used to flavour all sorts of dishes. These concoctions, such as garum and liquamen (to give two Latin names) would have seemed noxious to our grandparents, but make a bit more sense to a generation which has discovered Asian cuisines that use the fairly comparable kapi or nuoc mam.

But fish were not killed ritually for these uses. Rather than being selected individually and slaughtered, fish were harvested almost like grain, hauled up and allowed to drown in the air. These wild and strange aquatic animals were not regarded as appropriate for rituals where meat, product of human interaction with nature at all points in its production, was appropriate.

Christians were often ambivalent about such meat-eating, because of its close connection with sacrifice. Fish was not significant in itself, but a safer - even a more "secular" - luxury food, which could serve as an alternative for celebration where meat was too fraught with idolatrous associations. In the end, the Church enshrined this ambivalence about meat through cycles of abstinence, temporarily holding meat at arm's length and then resuming a more omnivorous approach.

Fridays in general and the season of Lent are attested as times of fasting in the first few centuries of Christian history, and were thus points at which dishes involving fish - and vegetarian food - flourished in the gastronomic lives of communities where Christianity took root. Of course there were other, later, developments that gave rise to the "fish on Fridays" phenomenon as it became known: complex interactions between papal decrees and the fishing industry in the West, extension of the prohibition of meat to include fish with blood and bones in the East - but those are other stories.

Meanwhile, the asceticism involved in allowing seafood in Lent is revealed to be something quite different from punishment of the self, or mere holding back from pleasure or indulgence; it is a means by which individuals and communities draw boundaries that identify themselves and their distinct character. You are what you eat - and, in a way, what you don't.

*Coming soon - what to do with the fish.