Most of us know that the Catholic religion says that you should not eat anything but fish on Fridays during Lent (the 40 days leading up to Easter), but many years ago, Catholics ate fish EVERY Friday! So how did we get here?

NPR aired a piece that claimed this religious observance “sounded like a plot for the perfect thriller”: A powerful pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry and alter global economics. (April 6, 2012 Lust, Lies and Empire: The Fishy Truth Behind Eating Fish on Friday). However, they say that although this “fishy” plot has circulated for SO long that we grew up believing it as fact, many researchers going through religious archives found nothing to substantiate it.

On a more realistic front, this tradition is said to commemorate and do penance for the death of Jesus. It is thought that Jesus died on a Friday, and since the first century, there has been reported fasting on Fridays.  Both meat and fish have been associated with sacred holidays for eons, but meat has always been seen as more of a luxury item, so people kept it simple and turned to less expensive fare and fish “fasting days” became popular along the way.  

Another take on why fish became part of the Lenten tradition is that since Jesus was “warm-blooded”, the eating of warm-blooded animals was taboo; but the alternative wasn’t just eating cold-blooded fish. If you felt a snake or reptile craving, that would have also been considered fair game!  Recently, I learned that in the early days of the Wild West, fish were not abundant (especially in the high mountains, where lakes were often still frozen over during much of Lent) so the Church even allowed for the eating of BEAVER as a fish replacement.

And while our modern day fish and chips, crab cakes, and lobster sure don’t seem like much of a punishment, originally much of fish consumed by the faithful masses was dry and unpalatable, since there was no way to preserve fish other than by heavily smoking or salting it. Then the Vikings started preserving cod into a kind of jerky, and other methods of preservation and distribution made fish tastier and more readily accessible.  

By the time of King Henry VIII, fish dominated the dinner table for a good part of the year…until Anne Boleyn came along. As you’re probably aware, Henry wanted Anne, but already had a wife. After the pope refused to annul his marriage, Henry broke off ties with the Catholic church and declared himself the head of the Church of England…and eating fish fell out of favor due to now being considered a political statement.

But then the fishing industry began to suffer, so much so that “fasting days” were reinstated by law.  And this law remained influential well into the 20th century. Finally, Pope Paul VI clarified (and loosened) the rules again in the 1960s causing U.S. fish prices to fall drastically, even though the Friday meat ban still applied to the 40 days of the Lenten season. So it was a bit of a convoluted path to get to eating fish on Fridays for lent, but at least we’ve come a long way from the days of cod jerky. Now, about that Easter ham…