![\"A](\"https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/zhuangzi-watson.jpg#center\"\n)
My copy: Burton Watson’s translation.
\nIn 2010, a Catholic in Louisiana asked his archbishop a very specific question. During Lent, Catholics skip meat on Fridays. So: was it okay to eat alligator?
\nThe archbishop’s answer: yes. As far as the Church was concerned, alligator counted as seafood.
\nHe wasn’t the first religious authority to get a question like that. Over the centuries, priests, bishops, and theologians have been asked to rule on beavers, muskrats, capybaras, and a goose that medieval Europeans believed grew on driftwood.
\nPeople have been arguing about where “meat” ends and “fish” begins for about two thousand years.
\nI’ve been living on that line for eight.
\nI’m a pescatarian. For more than eight years, I haven’t eaten meat or poultry: no beef, no pork, no chicken, no turkey. I do eat fish, seafood, eggs, and dairy. Sushi is my second-favorite food on Earth.
\nSpoiler: my own reasons ended up closer to a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,300 years ago, and who once got into an argument about whether fish are happy, than to any bishop’s.
\nBut first: almost every major religion has drawn this line too, and their reasons are stranger than mine.
\nJesus’s first disciples were fishermen. The miracle of the loaves and fishes fed thousands. In the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus proves he isn’t a ghost by eating a piece of broiled fish. Early Christians even adopted the fish as a symbol: the Greek word for fish, ichthys, doubles as an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”
\nSo when the Church began setting fast days when meat was forbidden, fish was never on the chopping block. In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas explained why. The flesh of land animals was richer and more pleasurable, so it was more likely to stir up exactly the appetites fasting was meant to tame. Fish was lighter, humbler food.
\nToday’s rule works the same way. Catholics 14 and older skip meat on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays of Lent, and “meat” means the flesh of land animals like cows, pigs, and chickens. Fish, shellfish, and cold-blooded animals don’t count.
\nIn medieval Europe, fast days covered a huge chunk of the calendar. That created enormous demand for fish, which helped build entire fishing economies. It also created enormous demand for loopholes.
\nAccording to a much-repeated story, in the 1600s the Bishop of Quebec asked theologians whether beaver could be eaten on fast days. Beavers spend their lives in the water and have scaly tails. The verdict: close enough to a fish.
\nIt didn’t stop there:
\nThe pattern is always the same: if it lives in water, somebody will argue it’s a fish.
\nAnd in 1962, that same fasting rule accidentally created one of the most famous sandwiches in fast food.
\nLou Groen ran a McDonald’s in a heavily Catholic part of Cincinnati. Every Friday, his sales collapsed, because his customers went to the fish place down the road.
\nSo he invented a battered fish sandwich and pitched it to Ray Kroc, the head of McDonald’s. Kroc had his own meatless idea: the Hula Burger, a slice of grilled pineapple with cheese on a bun.
\nThey made a bet. Both sandwiches would go on sale one Friday, and whichever sold more would stay on the menu. According to McDonald’s lore, the Hula Burger got crushed.
\nThe Filet-O-Fish went national in 1965. McDonald’s has said Lent is still the sandwich’s busiest season. A Catholic fasting rule from the Middle Ages is the reason it exists.
\nMeanwhile, the Orthodox Church read the same Bible and took the salmon off the menu too. But not the shrimp.
\nEastern Orthodox Christians fast even harder, and their line lands somewhere completely different.
\nDuring strict fasts like Great Lent, Orthodox Christians traditionally give up meat, dairy, eggs, and fish with backbones. But shrimp, squid, octopus, and other shellfish are allowed, because they’re considered “bloodless” invertebrates. Fish itself comes back only on a couple of feast days, like Palm Sunday.
\nSo a Catholic during Lent can eat salmon but not chicken. An Orthodox Christian during Lent can eat shrimp but not salmon.
\nAnd in Jewish law, shrimp is off the menu entirely. The same rules explain why your bagel works.
\nKosher law draws its line with a physical test: fish must have fins and scales (Leviticus 11). That rules out shellfish, catfish, eels, and more.
\nAnd kosher fish belongs to a special category: pareve, meaning neither meat nor dairy. Kosher law forbids mixing meat and dairy, but fish is fine with dairy. That’s why lox and cream cheese on a bagel is a Jewish deli classic, while a real cheeseburger could never be kosher.
\n(Fish and meat are kept apart, though: the Talmud warns against eating them together, and the Shulchan Aruch, the standard code of Jewish law, made that a rule.)
\nIslamic law has fish rules too, and one of them makes fish the easiest meal on the menu.
\nThe Quran explicitly permits food from the sea. Unlike land animals, fish don’t need ritual slaughter to be halal. So for Muslims in places where halal meat is hard to find, fish is often the easy option.
\nThe schools of Islamic law still draw the line in different places. Most Sunni schools allow nearly all seafood. The Hanafi school generally limits it to fish, with debate over shrimp. Shia law allows fish with scales, plus shrimp, but not other shellfish.
\nFurther east, the story involves a god who took the form of a fish, and an emperor who shocked his country by eating beef.
\nIn Hindu tradition, the first avatar of the god Vishnu is Matsya, a fish, who warns Manu, the first man, of a great flood and tows his boat to safety. Many Hindus are vegetarian, but not everywhere. In Bengal, fish is so central that even many Brahmin families, who are often strictly vegetarian elsewhere in India, eat it, and a decorated whole fish is a traditional gift at Bengali weddings.
\nBuddhism’s first precept is to refrain from taking life, but Buddhist traditions apply it to food very differently. Many East Asian Buddhist monks are strictly vegetarian, and Japanese Zen temple cooking, shojin ryori, uses no meat or fish at all. In Theravada tradition, monks eat whatever they’re given as alms, including meat, as long as the animal wasn’t killed specifically for them.
\nJapan is the most dramatic example of a whole country living near the pescatarian line. In 675, Emperor Tenmu restricted eating cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens during part of the year. Over the following centuries, under Buddhist influence, livestock mostly disappeared from the Japanese table, and fish moved to the center of it. (Hunted game never vanished completely.) Even whales were widely treated as fish; the Japanese character for “whale” is still written with the fish radical.
\nThen, in 1872, Emperor Meiji publicly ate beef, a signal that the old taboo was over. Modern Japanese beef dishes like sukiyaki grew out of that change.
\nHere’s what surprised me when I started digging: none of these traditions agree on where the line goes. Beaver is fish in one place, salmon is off-limits in another, and shrimp is either the safest or the most forbidden thing on the menu depending on who you ask. The line between meat and fish isn’t found in nature. People draw it.
\nHere’s where I drew mine.
\nThe short answer: I want to cause less suffering than I otherwise would, in a way I can actually keep up for decades.
\nIt didn’t start there, though. It started with how I felt. Eating meat left me sluggish, and I wanted to get fitter, so I tried going pescatarian the way an athlete tries anything: as an experiment. It stuck. Health got me in the door, and over eight years the reasons have grown well past my own body.
\nMy ethics don’t come down to one master rule. I weigh several things at once: not causing harm, taking care of my own health, being fair, keeping the commitments I make. Reducing suffering gets the most weight. And food is where that gets concrete, every single day. Cutting out meat and poultry removes the biggest share of the suffering my diet would otherwise cause, especially from industrial farming of land animals, which has well-documented welfare problems.
\nI’ve done stretches as a full vegetarian and as a vegan, each for less than a year. Both times, I came back to pescatarian.
\nWhat brought me back was several things at once. I trained better with fish in my diet. Covering the nutrients that are hard to get without animal foods, like B12 and omega-3s, took constant planning. And eating out, family meals, and travel turned into daily negotiations. Together, they made it a diet I was fighting instead of living with.
\nThe way I see it, a diet I can keep for decades does more good than a perfect one I quit after six months. Pescatarian is where the weighing lands for me. It’s a considered compromise, not a claim to purity.
\nIt’s also a practical one. Seafood provides vitamin B12, which plants don’t provide on their own, so vegans generally need supplements or fortified foods. And fatty fish is one of the best sources of the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA.
\nWhich brings me back to that philosopher.
\n My copy: Burton Watson’s translation.
\nHis name was Zhuangzi, and the book of stories and arguments that carries his name, the Zhuangzi, is one of the two great classics of Daoist philosophy. It’s the philosophy that shapes how I think about all of this. Daoist philosophy doesn’t tell you what to eat. It’s about moving with the natural grain of things instead of forcing them.
\nAnd conveniently for this post, it’s full of fish.
\nThe very first story in the Zhuangzi is about an enormous fish in the northern sea, named Kun, that transforms into an enormous bird, named Peng, and flies south.
\nRemember the barnacle goose, the bird medieval Europe thought came from the sea? Zhuangzi got there first, and on purpose. One of his big ideas is that the categories we sort the world into are ours, not the world’s. Fish, bird, meat, not-meat: useful labels, not laws of nature. Every beaver ruling above proves his point.
\nIn another story, Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi are walking across a bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi looks down at the minnows darting around and says they look happy.
\nHuizi objects: you’re not a fish, so how could you know what fish feel? Zhuangzi turns it around: you’re not me, so how do you know what I know? They go back and forth, and the argument never really resolves.
\nThat’s exactly where I am on the hardest question people ask me: “Fish are animals too, so why eat them?” Scientists and philosophers still debate how fish experience pain, and I can’t settle it from a bridge. I don’t claim eating fish is harmless. I claim it’s a smaller harm than the alternative I was choosing between, and that the uncertainty is a reason to eat fish with care: responsibly sourced, not wasted, not taken for granted.
\nHere’s an irony I love: one of the most famous stories in the Zhuangzi is about a butcher. Cook Ding carves an ox so skillfully, following the natural gaps between the joints, that his knife stays sharp for nineteen years. Everyone else hacks through bone and needs a new blade every month.
\nThe point isn’t about meat. It’s about attention. Cook Ding doesn’t force anything; he pays close enough attention to find the way through. That’s what I’m aiming for at the table: not a list of forbidden foods, but noticing where my food comes from and what it cost.
\nThe Daodejing, the other great Daoist classic, has a famous line: ruling a big country is like cooking a small fish. Keep poking at it, and it falls apart.
\nThat’s how I think about nutrition. I track what I eat, but tracking is for noticing real gaps, not for turning every meal into an exam. Poke too much and the whole thing falls apart.
\nDaoism’s central idea is wu wei, usually translated as “effortless action” or “non-forcing.” It doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means acting in a way that fits, so you’re not white-knuckling your way through life.
\nDiets that last are the ones that stop feeling like willpower. Eight years in, this one doesn’t feel like a rule I’m obeying. It’s just how I eat.
\nThese are the questions friends actually ask.
\nDo you get enough protein? Easily. Fish, eggs, dairy, beans, lentils, and tofu cover it.
\nWhat about everything else? I track my nutrition in Cronometer, which breaks food down into individual vitamins and minerals, so I know instead of guessing. When you cut out meat, the ones worth watching are iron, zinc, B12, and omega-3s. Seafood happens to be great for all four: oysters and clams for iron and zinc, fatty fish for B12 and omega-3s. Fatty fish and seafood are also some of the few good food sources of vitamin D and iodine. (I’m not a doctor or dietitian. If you’re changing how you eat in a big way, talk to one.)
\nIs it actually healthier? Maybe. Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom are vegetarian for religious reasons, are some of the most studied eaters on the planet. The Adventist Health Study-2 followed tens of thousands of members, and it’s where pescatarians came out ahead of vegans and vegetarians. Here’s how each diet did against meat eaters in two of its analyses, one on death from any cause and one on colorectal cancer:
\n| Diet | \n\t\t\t\t\tDeath rate | \n\t\t\t\t\tColorectal cancer | \n\t\t\t
|---|---|---|
| Pesco-vegetarian | \n\t\t\t\t\t19% lower | \n\t\t\t\t\t43% lower | \n\t\t\t
| Vegan | \n\t\t\t\t\t15% lower | \n\t\t\t\t\t16% lower | \n\t\t\t
| Lacto-ovo vegetarian | \n\t\t\t\t\t9% lower | \n\t\t\t\t\t18% lower | \n\t\t\t
The death-rate analysis followed 73,308 people for about six years, and the cancer one followed 77,659 people for about seven. The gaps between the three diets fall within the study’s margin of error, so read it as fish eaters edging ahead, not a knockout.
\nTwo big British studies, with no religious angle at all, also found fish eaters doing better than meat eaters. EPIC-Oxford followed about 48,000 people for 18 years, and fish eaters had a 13% lower rate of heart disease than meat eaters. UK Biobank followed almost half a million people for 11 years, and fish eaters had a 10% lower risk of cancer overall than regular meat eaters. In those two, vegetarians did better on some measures and worse on others (EPIC-Oxford found a higher stroke rate for them), so no single study settles which diet wins.
\nThe catch: these are all observational studies, so they can’t prove the diet caused those results. Adventists as a group also don’t smoke and rarely drink, and even after researchers adjust for things like that, people who choose a diet like this can differ in ways a study can’t fully measure. It’s not proof, but it’s not nothing.
\nWhat about mercury? This is the real homework. Mercury builds up in big, long-lived predator fish, so I pay attention to which fish, not just how much. The FDA’s list of fish to avoid, written for pregnant people and young kids, includes king mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, bigeye tuna, and tilefish from the Gulf of Mexico. For fish that are low in mercury and high in omega-3s, remember SMASH: salmon, mackerel (Atlantic, not king), anchovies, sardines, and herring.
\nIsn’t sushi full of tuna? Yes, and the big sushi tunas, like bigeye and bluefin, are some of the higher-mercury fish. I love tuna nigiri, so I just don’t make it the whole meal. Salmon, yellowtail, and shrimp are right there.
\nIs eating out hard? Not really. My three favorite cuisines are Mexican, sushi, and Indian, and they happen to be three of the easiest. Fish tacos and bean burritos, sushi, and Indian food, which has one of the deepest vegetarian traditions in the world. The one trap in Mexican food: refried beans are sometimes made with lard, and rice is sometimes cooked in chicken broth. It’s worth asking.
\nWhere does meat hide? Gelatin in gummy candy and marshmallows (it usually comes from pigs or cows). Chicken broth in soups, rice, and risotto. Lard in tortillas and pie crusts. And one that goes the other way: Worcestershire sauce and Caesar dressing usually contain anchovies. Vegetarians have to skip them. Pescatarians don’t.
\n“Fish are animals too.” Yes. See the happy fish above: eating fish isn’t harmless. It’s a different place to draw the line, and after everything in this post, I’m clearly not the only one who drew it there.
\n“Is fish better for the environment than chicken?” Honestly, not automatically. Beef has a far bigger climate footprint than almost anything else, so cutting red meat is the big win. But farmed fish and chicken often land in a similar range, and beans, lentils, and tofu are generally the lowest of all.
\n“What about overfishing?” It’s real. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch rates seafood by how sustainably it’s caught or farmed, and the MSC (wild) and ASC (farmed) labels mark certified sources. Farmed mussels and oysters are some of the most sustainable seafood there is. They’re filter feeders, so they don’t even need to be fed.
\nThe Zhuangzi has one more fish story, and it’s my favorite.
\nA fish trap exists to catch fish. Once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget the trap. Words exist to catch meaning. Once you’ve caught the meaning, you can forget the words.
\n“Pescatarian” is a fish trap. It’s a handy word for ordering at a restaurant, or for a blog title. But every tradition in this post drew its line somewhere different: fins and scales, warm blood and cold, backbones, whatever the local bishop decided about beavers. The word matters less than what’s underneath it: paying attention to what’s on your plate, and what it cost.
\nI drew my line eight years ago, and it’s held.
\nAnd for the record: even with an archbishop’s blessing, I’m not eating the alligator.
\n", "content_text": "In 2010, a Catholic in Louisiana asked his archbishop a very specific question. During Lent, Catholics skip meat on Fridays. So: was it okay to eat alligator?\nThe archbishop’s answer: yes. As far as the Church was concerned, alligator counted as seafood.\nHe wasn’t the first religious authority to get a question like that. Over the centuries, priests, bishops, and theologians have been asked to rule on beavers, muskrats, capybaras, and a goose that medieval Europeans believed grew on driftwood.\nPeople have been arguing about where “meat” ends and “fish” begins for about two thousand years.\nI’ve been living on that line for eight.\nThe short version of me I’m a pescatarian. For more than eight years, I haven’t eaten meat or poultry: no beef, no pork, no chicken, no turkey. I do eat fish, seafood, eggs, and dairy. Sushi is my second-favorite food on Earth.\nSpoiler: my own reasons ended up closer to a Chinese philosopher who lived 2,300 years ago, and who once got into an argument about whether fish are happy, than to any bishop’s.\nBut first: almost every major religion has drawn this line too, and their reasons are stranger than mine.\nChristianity was a fish religion from the start Jesus’s first disciples were fishermen. The miracle of the loaves and fishes fed thousands. In the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus proves he isn’t a ghost by eating a piece of broiled fish. Early Christians even adopted the fish as a symbol: the Greek word for fish, ichthys, doubles as an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”\nSo when the Church began setting fast days when meat was forbidden, fish was never on the chopping block. In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas explained why. The flesh of land animals was richer and more pleasurable, so it was more likely to stir up exactly the appetites fasting was meant to tame. Fish was lighter, humbler food.\nToday’s rule works the same way. Catholics 14 and older skip meat on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays of Lent, and “meat” means the flesh of land animals like cows, pigs, and chickens. Fish, shellfish, and cold-blooded animals don’t count.\nIn medieval Europe, fast days covered a huge chunk of the calendar. That created enormous demand for fish, which helped build entire fishing economies. It also created enormous demand for loopholes.\nIs a beaver a fish? According to a much-repeated story, in the 1600s the Bishop of Quebec asked theologians whether beaver could be eaten on fast days. Beavers spend their lives in the water and have scaly tails. The verdict: close enough to a fish.\nIt didn’t stop there:\nMuskrat: in parts of southeast Michigan, Catholics have long been allowed to eat muskrat on Lenten Fridays, a tradition going back to French settlers along the Detroit River. Capybara: in Venezuela, capybara is a traditional Lenten dish, backed by a legend that the Vatican once classified the world’s largest rodent as a fish. Alligator: see above. Louisiana, 2010. Barnacle geese: these geese breed in the Arctic, so medieval Europeans never saw them nest. The popular explanation was that they grew out of barnacles on driftwood. If they came from the sea, they were fish, and fair game on fast days. Pope Innocent III is said to have shut that one down in 1215. The pattern is always the same: if it lives in water, somebody will argue it’s a fish.\nAnd in 1962, that same fasting rule accidentally created one of the most famous sandwiches in fast food.\nThe burger that lost to a fish sandwich Lou Groen ran a McDonald’s in a heavily Catholic part of Cincinnati. Every Friday, his sales collapsed, because his customers went to the fish place down the road.\nSo he invented a battered fish sandwich and pitched it to Ray Kroc, the head of McDonald’s. Kroc had his own meatless idea: the Hula Burger, a slice of grilled pineapple with cheese on a bun.\nThey made a bet. Both sandwiches would go on sale one Friday, and whichever sold more would stay on the menu. According to McDonald’s lore, the Hula Burger got crushed.\nThe Filet-O-Fish went national in 1965. McDonald’s has said Lent is still the sandwich’s busiest season. A Catholic fasting rule from the Middle Ages is the reason it exists.\nMeanwhile, the Orthodox Church read the same Bible and took the salmon off the menu too. But not the shrimp.\nShrimp: yes. Salmon: no. Eastern Orthodox Christians fast even harder, and their line lands somewhere completely different.\nDuring strict fasts like Great Lent, Orthodox Christians traditionally give up meat, dairy, eggs, and fish with backbones. But shrimp, squid, octopus, and other shellfish are allowed, because they’re considered “bloodless” invertebrates. Fish itself comes back only on a couple of feast days, like Palm Sunday.\nSo a Catholic during Lent can eat salmon but not chicken. An Orthodox Christian during Lent can eat shrimp but not salmon.\nAnd in Jewish law, shrimp is off the menu entirely. The same rules explain why your bagel works.\nWhy your bagel works Kosher law draws its line with a physical test: fish must have fins and scales (Leviticus 11). That rules out shellfish, catfish, eels, and more.\nAnd kosher fish belongs to a special category: pareve, meaning neither meat nor dairy. Kosher law forbids mixing meat and dairy, but fish is fine with dairy. That’s why lox and cream cheese on a bagel is a Jewish deli classic, while a real cheeseburger could never be kosher.\n(Fish and meat are kept apart, though: the Talmud warns against eating them together, and the Shulchan Aruch, the standard code of Jewish law, made that a rule.)\nIslamic law has fish rules too, and one of them makes fish the easiest meal on the menu.\nThe easiest halal meal on the menu The Quran explicitly permits food from the sea. Unlike land animals, fish don’t need ritual slaughter to be halal. So for Muslims in places where halal meat is hard to find, fish is often the easy option.\nThe schools of Islamic law still draw the line in different places. Most Sunni schools allow nearly all seafood. The Hanafi school generally limits it to fish, with debate over shrimp. Shia law allows fish with scales, plus shrimp, but not other shellfish.\nFurther east, the story involves a god who took the form of a fish, and an emperor who shocked his country by eating beef.\nA fish god and a beef-eating emperor In Hindu tradition, the first avatar of the god Vishnu is Matsya, a fish, who warns Manu, the first man, of a great flood and tows his boat to safety. Many Hindus are vegetarian, but not everywhere. In Bengal, fish is so central that even many Brahmin families, who are often strictly vegetarian elsewhere in India, eat it, and a decorated whole fish is a traditional gift at Bengali weddings.\nBuddhism’s first precept is to refrain from taking life, but Buddhist traditions apply it to food very differently. Many East Asian Buddhist monks are strictly vegetarian, and Japanese Zen temple cooking, shojin ryori, uses no meat or fish at all. In Theravada tradition, monks eat whatever they’re given as alms, including meat, as long as the animal wasn’t killed specifically for them.\nJapan is the most dramatic example of a whole country living near the pescatarian line. In 675, Emperor Tenmu restricted eating cattle, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens during part of the year. Over the following centuries, under Buddhist influence, livestock mostly disappeared from the Japanese table, and fish moved to the center of it. (Hunted game never vanished completely.) Even whales were widely treated as fish; the Japanese character for “whale” is still written with the fish radical.\nThen, in 1872, Emperor Meiji publicly ate beef, a signal that the old taboo was over. Modern Japanese beef dishes like sukiyaki grew out of that change.\nSo why am I a pescatarian? Here’s what surprised me when I started digging: none of these traditions agree on where the line goes. Beaver is fish in one place, salmon is off-limits in another, and shrimp is either the safest or the most forbidden thing on the menu depending on who you ask. The line between meat and fish isn’t found in nature. People draw it.\nHere’s where I drew mine.\nThe short answer: I want to cause less suffering than I otherwise would, in a way I can actually keep up for decades.\nIt didn’t start there, though. It started with how I felt. Eating meat left me sluggish, and I wanted to get fitter, so I tried going pescatarian the way an athlete tries anything: as an experiment. It stuck. Health got me in the door, and over eight years the reasons have grown well past my own body.\nMy ethics don’t come down to one master rule. I weigh several things at once: not causing harm, taking care of my own health, being fair, keeping the commitments I make. Reducing suffering gets the most weight. And food is where that gets concrete, every single day. Cutting out meat and poultry removes the biggest share of the suffering my diet would otherwise cause, especially from industrial farming of land animals, which has well-documented welfare problems.\nI tried going further I’ve done stretches as a full vegetarian and as a vegan, each for less than a year. Both times, I came back to pescatarian.\nWhat brought me back was several things at once. I trained better with fish in my diet. Covering the nutrients that are hard to get without animal foods, like B12 and omega-3s, took constant planning. And eating out, family meals, and travel turned into daily negotiations. Together, they made it a diet I was fighting instead of living with.\nThe way I see it, a diet I can keep for decades does more good than a perfect one I quit after six months. Pescatarian is where the weighing lands for me. It’s a considered compromise, not a claim to purity.\nIt’s also a practical one. Seafood provides vitamin B12, which plants don’t provide on their own, so vegans generally need supplements or fortified foods. And fatty fish is one of the best sources of the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA.\nWhich brings me back to that philosopher.\nWhat an ancient book about fish taught me My copy: Burton Watson’s translation.\nHis name was Zhuangzi, and the book of stories and arguments that carries his name, the Zhuangzi, is one of the two great classics of Daoist philosophy. It’s the philosophy that shapes how I think about all of this. Daoist philosophy doesn’t tell you what to eat. It’s about moving with the natural grain of things instead of forcing them.\nAnd conveniently for this post, it’s full of fish.\nIt opens with a fish that becomes a bird The very first story in the Zhuangzi is about an enormous fish in the northern sea, named Kun, that transforms into an enormous bird, named Peng, and flies south.\nRemember the barnacle goose, the bird medieval Europe thought came from the sea? Zhuangzi got there first, and on purpose. One of his big ideas is that the categories we sort the world into are ours, not the world’s. Fish, bird, meat, not-meat: useful labels, not laws of nature. Every beaver ruling above proves his point.\nThe happiness of fish In another story, Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi are walking across a bridge over the Hao River. Zhuangzi looks down at the minnows darting around and says they look happy.\nHuizi objects: you’re not a fish, so how could you know what fish feel? Zhuangzi turns it around: you’re not me, so how do you know what I know? They go back and forth, and the argument never really resolves.\nThat’s exactly where I am on the hardest question people ask me: “Fish are animals too, so why eat them?” Scientists and philosophers still debate how fish experience pain, and I can’t settle it from a bridge. I don’t claim eating fish is harmless. I claim it’s a smaller harm than the alternative I was choosing between, and that the uncertainty is a reason to eat fish with care: responsibly sourced, not wasted, not taken for granted.\nCook Ding and the grain of things Here’s an irony I love: one of the most famous stories in the Zhuangzi is about a butcher. Cook Ding carves an ox so skillfully, following the natural gaps between the joints, that his knife stays sharp for nineteen years. Everyone else hacks through bone and needs a new blade every month.\nThe point isn’t about meat. It’s about attention. Cook Ding doesn’t force anything; he pays close enough attention to find the way through. That’s what I’m aiming for at the table: not a list of forbidden foods, but noticing where my food comes from and what it cost.\nDon’t poke the small fish The Daodejing, the other great Daoist classic, has a famous line: ruling a big country is like cooking a small fish. Keep poking at it, and it falls apart.\nThat’s how I think about nutrition. I track what I eat, but tracking is for noticing real gaps, not for turning every meal into an exam. Poke too much and the whole thing falls apart.\nWu wei: the diet you don’t have to force Daoism’s central idea is wu wei, usually translated as “effortless action” or “non-forcing.” It doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means acting in a way that fits, so you’re not white-knuckling your way through life.\nDiets that last are the ones that stop feeling like willpower. Eight years in, this one doesn’t feel like a rule I’m obeying. It’s just how I eat.\nLiving on the line: the practical stuff These are the questions friends actually ask.\nDo you get enough protein? Easily. Fish, eggs, dairy, beans, lentils, and tofu cover it.\nWhat about everything else? I track my nutrition in Cronometer, which breaks food down into individual vitamins and minerals, so I know instead of guessing. When you cut out meat, the ones worth watching are iron, zinc, B12, and omega-3s. Seafood happens to be great for all four: oysters and clams for iron and zinc, fatty fish for B12 and omega-3s. Fatty fish and seafood are also some of the few good food sources of vitamin D and iodine. (I’m not a doctor or dietitian. If you’re changing how you eat in a big way, talk to one.)\nIs it actually healthier? Maybe. Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom are vegetarian for religious reasons, are some of the most studied eaters on the planet. The Adventist Health Study-2 followed tens of thousands of members, and it’s where pescatarians came out ahead of vegans and vegetarians. Here’s how each diet did against meat eaters in two of its analyses, one on death from any cause and one on colorectal cancer:\nDiet Death rate Colorectal cancer Pesco-vegetarian 19% lower 43% lower Vegan 15% lower 16% lower Lacto-ovo vegetarian 9% lower 18% lower The death-rate analysis followed 73,308 people for about six years, and the cancer one followed 77,659 people for about seven. The gaps between the three diets fall within the study’s margin of error, so read it as fish eaters edging ahead, not a knockout.\nTwo big British studies, with no religious angle at all, also found fish eaters doing better than meat eaters. EPIC-Oxford followed about 48,000 people for 18 years, and fish eaters had a 13% lower rate of heart disease than meat eaters. UK Biobank followed almost half a million people for 11 years, and fish eaters had a 10% lower risk of cancer overall than regular meat eaters. In those two, vegetarians did better on some measures and worse on others (EPIC-Oxford found a higher stroke rate for them), so no single study settles which diet wins.\nThe catch: these are all observational studies, so they can’t prove the diet caused those results. Adventists as a group also don’t smoke and rarely drink, and even after researchers adjust for things like that, people who choose a diet like this can differ in ways a study can’t fully measure. It’s not proof, but it’s not nothing.\nWhat about mercury? This is the real homework. Mercury builds up in big, long-lived predator fish, so I pay attention to which fish, not just how much. The FDA’s list of fish to avoid, written for pregnant people and young kids, includes king mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish, bigeye tuna, and tilefish from the Gulf of Mexico. For fish that are low in mercury and high in omega-3s, remember SMASH: salmon, mackerel (Atlantic, not king), anchovies, sardines, and herring.\nIsn’t sushi full of tuna? Yes, and the big sushi tunas, like bigeye and bluefin, are some of the higher-mercury fish. I love tuna nigiri, so I just don’t make it the whole meal. Salmon, yellowtail, and shrimp are right there.\nIs eating out hard? Not really. My three favorite cuisines are Mexican, sushi, and Indian, and they happen to be three of the easiest. Fish tacos and bean burritos, sushi, and Indian food, which has one of the deepest vegetarian traditions in the world. The one trap in Mexican food: refried beans are sometimes made with lard, and rice is sometimes cooked in chicken broth. It’s worth asking.\nWhere does meat hide? Gelatin in gummy candy and marshmallows (it usually comes from pigs or cows). Chicken broth in soups, rice, and risotto. Lard in tortillas and pie crusts. And one that goes the other way: Worcestershire sauce and Caesar dressing usually contain anchovies. Vegetarians have to skip them. Pescatarians don’t.\nThe honest criticisms “Fish are animals too.” Yes. See the happy fish above: eating fish isn’t harmless. It’s a different place to draw the line, and after everything in this post, I’m clearly not the only one who drew it there.\n“Is fish better for the environment than chicken?” Honestly, not automatically. Beef has a far bigger climate footprint than almost anything else, so cutting red meat is the big win. But farmed fish and chicken often land in a similar range, and beans, lentils, and tofu are generally the lowest of all.\n“What about overfishing?” It’s real. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch rates seafood by how sustainably it’s caught or farmed, and the MSC (wild) and ASC (farmed) labels mark certified sources. Farmed mussels and oysters are some of the most sustainable seafood there is. They’re filter feeders, so they don’t even need to be fed.\nIf you’re thinking about trying it Start with a swap, not a rule. Replace one meat meal a week with fish or beans and see how it goes. Learn five meals you love. Diets fail when every meal feels like a sacrifice. Track for a few weeks. It shows you real gaps instead of vague worries. Then stop poking the fish. Rotate your fish. Lean on the SMASH fish, and go easy on the big predators. Don’t be preachy. Zhuangzi has a line about fish stranded on dry land when the springs dry up, keeping each other alive by spitting on each other, and how much better it would be if they could just forget each other in the rivers and lakes. Nobody wants to be spat on at dinner. When people ask, answer. When they don’t, eat your fish tacos in peace. Closing thought The Zhuangzi has one more fish story, and it’s my favorite.\nA fish trap exists to catch fish. Once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget the trap. Words exist to catch meaning. Once you’ve caught the meaning, you can forget the words.\n“Pescatarian” is a fish trap. It’s a handy word for ordering at a restaurant, or for a blog title. But every tradition in this post drew its line somewhere different: fins and scales, warm blood and cold, backbones, whatever the local bishop decided about beavers. The word matters less than what’s underneath it: paying attention to what’s on your plate, and what it cost.\nI drew my line eight years ago, and it’s held.\nAnd for the record: even with an archbishop’s blessing, I’m not eating the alligator.", "cover": { "alt": "A terminal listing animals that religious rulings counted as fish, above the post title", "height": 630, "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/cover.png", "width": 1200 }, "description": "For two thousand years, religions have argued about where meat ends and fish begins, with rulings on beavers, alligators, and geese that grow on driftwood. I've lived on that line for eight years. Here's the history, the Daoist philosophy behind how I think about it, and how I actually eat.", "headings": [ { "id": "the-short-version-of-me", "level": 2, "title": "The short version of me", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#the-short-version-of-me" }, { "id": "christianity-was-a-fish-religion-from-the-start", "level": 2, "title": "Christianity was a fish religion from the start", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#christianity-was-a-fish-religion-from-the-start" }, { "id": "is-a-beaver-a-fish", "level": 2, "title": "Is a beaver a fish?", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#is-a-beaver-a-fish" }, { "id": "the-burger-that-lost-to-a-fish-sandwich", "level": 2, "title": "The burger that lost to a fish sandwich", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#the-burger-that-lost-to-a-fish-sandwich" }, { "id": "shrimp-yes-salmon-no", "level": 2, "title": "Shrimp: yes. Salmon: no.", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#shrimp-yes-salmon-no" }, { "id": "why-your-bagel-works", "level": 2, "title": "Why your bagel works", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#why-your-bagel-works" }, { "id": "the-easiest-halal-meal-on-the-menu", "level": 2, "title": "The easiest halal meal on the menu", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#the-easiest-halal-meal-on-the-menu" }, { "id": "a-fish-god-and-a-beef-eating-emperor", "level": 2, "title": "A fish god and a beef-eating emperor", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#a-fish-god-and-a-beef-eating-emperor" }, { "id": "so-why-am-i-a-pescatarian", "level": 2, "title": "So why am I a pescatarian?", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#so-why-am-i-a-pescatarian" }, { "id": "i-tried-going-further", "level": 2, "title": "I tried going further", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#i-tried-going-further" }, { "id": "what-an-ancient-book-about-fish-taught-me", "level": 2, "title": "What an ancient book about fish taught me", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#what-an-ancient-book-about-fish-taught-me" }, { "id": "it-opens-with-a-fish-that-becomes-a-bird", "level": 3, "title": "It opens with a fish that becomes a bird", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#it-opens-with-a-fish-that-becomes-a-bird" }, { "id": "the-happiness-of-fish", "level": 3, "title": "The happiness of fish", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#the-happiness-of-fish" }, { "id": "cook-ding-and-the-grain-of-things", "level": 3, "title": "Cook Ding and the grain of things", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#cook-ding-and-the-grain-of-things" }, { "id": "dont-poke-the-small-fish", "level": 3, "title": "Don’t poke the small fish", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#dont-poke-the-small-fish" }, { "id": "wu-wei-the-diet-you-dont-have-to-force", "level": 3, "title": "Wu wei: the diet you don’t have to force", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#wu-wei-the-diet-you-dont-have-to-force" }, { "id": "living-on-the-line-the-practical-stuff", "level": 2, "title": "Living on the line: the practical stuff", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#living-on-the-line-the-practical-stuff" }, { "id": "the-honest-criticisms", "level": 2, "title": "The honest criticisms", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#the-honest-criticisms" }, { "id": "if-youre-thinking-about-trying-it", "level": 2, "title": "If you’re thinking about trying it", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#if-youre-thinking-about-trying-it" }, { "id": "closing-thought", "level": 2, "title": "Closing thought", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/#closing-thought" } ], "images": [ { "height": 630, "is_cover": true, "name": "cover.png", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/cover.png", "width": 1200 }, { "height": 1001, "is_cover": false, "name": "zhuangzi-watson.jpg", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/zhuangzi-watson.jpg", "width": 800 } ], "license": { "code": "MIT", "writing": "CC-BY-4.0" }, "links": { "external": [ "https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.6473", "https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.59", "https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l4897", "https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-022-02256-w" ], "internal": [] }, "newer": null, "older": { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/posts/gitattributes.json", "slug": "gitattributes", "title": "The Best Git Feature You've Never Used", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/gitattributes/" }, "published": "2026-09-24T23:06:00-07:00", "reading_time_minutes": 16, "slug": "pescatarian", "source": { "history": "https://github.com/Londopy/blog/commits/main/content/posts/pescatarian/index.md", "markdown": "https://github.com/Londopy/blog/blob/main/content/posts/pescatarian/index.md", "raw": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Londopy/blog/main/content/posts/pescatarian/index.md" }, "summary": "In 2010, a Catholic in Louisiana asked his archbishop a very specific question. During Lent, Catholics skip meat on Fridays. So: was it okay to eat alligator?\nThe archbishop’s answer: yes. As far as the Church was concerned, alligator counted as seafood.\nHe wasn’t the first religious authority to get a question like that. Over the centuries, priests, bishops, and theologians have been asked to rule on beavers, muskrats, capybaras, and a goose that medieval Europeans believed grew on driftwood.", "tags": [ { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/food.json", "name": "food", "slug": "food", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/food/" }, { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/pescatarian.json", "name": "pescatarian", "slug": "pescatarian", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/pescatarian/" }, { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/history.json", "name": "history", "slug": "history", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/history/" }, { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/religion.json", "name": "religion", "slug": "religion", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/religion/" }, { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/philosophy.json", "name": "philosophy", "slug": "philosophy", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/philosophy/" }, { "api_url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/tags/daoism.json", "name": "daoism", "slug": "daoism", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/tags/daoism/" } ], "title": "When Alligator Counts as Fish & Why I'm a Pescatarian", "updated": "2026-09-25T00:01:51-07:00", "url": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/posts/pescatarian/", "word_count": 3380 }, "meta": { "api": "londopy-blog", "docs": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/", "generated": "2026-09-25T20:47:28Z", "self": "https://londopy.github.io/blog/api/v1/latest.json", "version": "1.0.0" } }