19/11, cccb -- Rosi Braidotti becoming animal
Q: and what about eating insects?
A: aboriginals have been eating them for ages. I tried them once. I mean ... insects are a bit like shrimps, right? They are crunchy, like crisps.

• Some follow-up on the creativity of catholic animal taxonomy ... 
• When I told you about eating birds on Friday because they fell from the sky, I thought this was a story from my dad's childhood. He was brought up as a good catholic in the 50's in The Netherlands, it turns out a bit more messy than that. 
• At first I could not find any reference to these falling birds, but the Internets are of course full of promiscuous species -- in order to be eaten on Fridays, beavers, puffins, alligators and capybara have been turned into fish (in Canada, France, USA and Venezuela respectively). An Italian friend vaguely remembered a pope crazy about cooked snails arguing that they were coldblooded, hence fish. Or what about "a bishop of Munich in the Middle Ages, who went on a hunt on Friday and shot a really big deer. Worried that he could not eat it right away, he threw it in the next lake and shouted: look, 'it swims', and then had his servants fish it out and prepare it." (this from a creationist thread on taxonomy!). Wikipedia claims that Thomas Aquinas explained such taxonomic drifts in Summa Theologica: "animal classification is based as much on habit as anatomy". Nice, but I would have liked to see where he actually said this. 
• I asked my dad about the falling birds and he said they were 'talingen' (a small type of duck). These birds allegedly grew on trees, a story he read only much later in a book by Hélène Nolthenius. He also said that his father would hunt these ducks, and that his mother indeed prepared them on Fridays. He remembered them tasting fishy but that seems a trick of memory. 
• Yesterday he sent me the actual reference, which is not at all about ducks. In the book, an English monk reports to his Italian colleagues that in his country, 'barneta'-birds grow on trees. This must be a Dutch translation of 'barnacle goose' (so not a duck) that was believed to grow on 'barnacle trees'. When its fruit fell into the sea, they transformed into geese. These 'birds' were therefore considered to be plants. Because barnacle geese disappeared in winter, and nobody in continental Europe had ever seen them lay eggs, it was a good-enough explanation. Other stories explain that barnacle geese grew on or from rotting driftwood. 
• 'Barnacle' is also a specific kind of mussel/shellfish which in Dutch translates into 'eenden-mossel' (duck-mussel), a shell that when alive, looks a bit like a barnacle goose! 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose#Folklore
Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife (2018) 
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/once-upon-a-time-the-catholic-church-decided-that-beavers-were-fish/
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3147.htm
Hélène Nolthenius, Een man uit het dal van Spoleto: Franciscus tussen zijn tijdgenoten (1988) p16-17 
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.talk.creationism/LrBBnWdNYb0
http://users.telenet.be/hugo.ollieuz/media/eendenmossel-03.jpg
https://www.anaburen.nl/vogels/galerij/brandgans2014-06-17.jpg

---

"The Italian Minorite Friar Odoric of Pordenone, upon recalling first hearing of the vegetable lamb, told of trees on the shore of the Irish Sea with gourd-like fruits that fell into the water and became birds called Bernacles. He is referring to the legendary plant-animal, the barnacle tree. This tree was believed to drop its ripened fruit into the sea near the Orkney Islands. The ripened fruit would then release “barnacle geese” that would live in the water, becoming mature geese. The alleged existence of this fellow plant-animal was even accepted as an explanation for migrating geese from the North."

In die tijd groeiden er aan verre kusten bepaalde bomen, waarvan de vruchten die in het water vielen in watervogels veranderden.'
http://klaasnanninga.nl/images/vondst/de-vogelboom.gif

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (Latin: Agnus scythicus or Planta Tartarica Barometz[1]) is a legendary zoophyte of Central Asia, once believed to grow sheep as its fruit. It was believed the sheep were connected to the plant by an umbilical cord and grazed the land around the plant. When all accessible foliage was gone, both the plant and sheep died. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_Lamb_of_Tartary

There were even more fantastic stories involving the barnacle goose, a bird that we now know migrates from obscure Arctic seas to the coasts of Britain every winter. Its most northerly breeding grounds on the high cliffs of Greenland were never observed by the European authors of the medieval bestiaries, who instead promoted the rather unlikely story that barnacle geese grew out of the rotting timbers of ships.

“Nature produces them against nature in the most extraordinary way,” wrote the twelfth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales. “They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea.” The medieval clergyman claimed to have actually witnessed the bird’s phenomenal genesis during an expedition to Ireland. “Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to a timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they fall into the water or fly freely away into the air.”

Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife (2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose#Folklore

The natural history of the barnacle goose was long surrounded with a legend claiming that they were born of driftwood:  Nature produces [Bernacae] against Nature in the most extraordinary way. They are like marsh geese but somewhat smaller. They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air. They derived their food and growth from the sap of the wood or from the sea, by a secret and most wonderful process of alimentation. I have frequently seen, with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the sea-shore from one piece of timber, enclosed in their shells, and already formed. They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth.[12] The legend was widely repeated in, for example, Vincent of Beauvais's great encyclopedia. However, it was also criticized by other medieval authors, including Albertus Magnus.[12]

This belief may be related to the fact that these geese were never seen in summer, when they were supposedly developing underwater (they were actually breeding in remote Arctic regions) in the form of barnacles—which came to have the name "barnacle" because of this legend. 

Based on these legends—indeed, the legends may have been invented for this purpose[13]—some Irish clerics considered barnacle goose flesh to be acceptable fast day food, a practice that was criticized by Giraldus Cambrensis, a Welsh author: 

...Bishops and religious men (viri religiosi) in some parts of Ireland do not scruple to dine off these birds at the time of fasting, because they are not flesh nor born of flesh... But in so doing they are led into sin. For if anyone were to eat of the leg of our first parent (Adam) although he was not born of flesh, that person could not be adjudged innocent of eating meat.[12]
At the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), Pope Innocent III explicitly prohibited the eating of these geese during Lent, arguing that despite their unusual reproduction, they lived and fed like ducks and so were of the same nature as other birds.[14]

The question of the nature of barnacle geese also came up as a matter of Jewish dietary law in the Halakha, and Rabbeinu Tam (1100–71) determined that they were kosher (even if born of trees) and should be slaughtered following the normal prescriptions for birds.[12] The mythical barnacle tree, believed in the Middle Ages to have barnacles that opened to reveal geese, may have a similar origin to the other legends already mentioned.[15]



Helene Noltenius

Martino: 'A pope who liked snails, decided to declare them fish'

Canada and US: Beavers are considered fish 
"So in the 17th century, the Bishop of Quebec approached his superiors in the Church and asked whether his flock would be permitted to eat beaver meat on Fridays during Lent, despite the fact that meat-eating was forbidden. Since the semi-aquatic rodent was a skilled swimmer, the Church declared that the beaver was a fish. Being a fish, beaver barbeques were permitted throughout Lent. Problem solved!"
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/once-upon-a-time-the-catholic-church-decided-that-beavers-were-fish/

Venezuela: Capybara considered fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capybara
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/in-days-before-easter-venezuelans-tuck-into/11063/

Naiman R.J., Johnston C.A. & Kelley J.C. (1988). Alteration of North American Streams by Beaver, BioScience, 38 (11) 753-762. DOI: 10.2307/1310784
Worsley P. (2009). The Physical Geology of Beavers, MERCIAN GEOLOGIST, 17 (2) 112-121.

Vasten versus onthouding

Taxonomic vandals

In the 17th century, based on a question raised by the Bishop of Quebec, the Roman Catholic Church ruled that the beaver was a fish (beaver flesh was a part of the Yuko[65]indigenous peoples' diet, prior to the Europeans' arrival[66]) for purposes of dietary law. Therefore, the general prohibition on the consumption of meat on Fridays did not apply to beaver meat.[67][68][69] The legal basis for the decision probably rests with the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which bases animal classification as much on habit as anatomy.[70] This is similar to the Church's classification of other semi-aquatic rodents, such as the capybara and muskrat.[71][72]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver

the Church forbade those who fast to partake of those foods which both afford most pleasure to the palate, and besides are a very great incentive to lust. Such are the flesh of animals that take their rest on the earth, and of those that breathe the air and their products, such as milk from those that walk on the earth, and eggs from birds. For, since such like animals are more like man in body, they afford greater pleasure as food, and greater nourishment to the human body, so that from their consumption there results a greater surplus available for seminal matter, which when abundant becomes a great incentive to lust. Hence the Church has bidden those who fast to abstain especially from these foods.  
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3147.htm


Talingen mogenop vrijdag gegeten worden omdat ze in engeland aan de bomen groeien