Fish are Animals, Beans are Not

The other day I had the pleasure of using my vegetarianism as an excuse to keep from trying pickled herring on a saltine. The wielder of the herring said to me: “But if you’re a vegetarian you eat fish.” Um, not the last time I checked, I thought. My actual response was more polite. I simply said, “No, I don’t eat fish.”

Once the herring experiment was complete and I was breathing through my nose again, the herring man turned to me and said, “You really don’t eat fish?” I replied: “No, I don’t eat any animals.” His response? “I guess I never thought of fish as animals.” I admit here that my next statement was a little less polite. I said to him: “They’re not plants.” Well, I mean come on. Fish have blood, a brain, eyes . . . they’re animals! They may not be furry, cuddly, or cute, but they’re animals. Any semi-functioning biologist would put them in the kingdom animalia. The only other options, according to the game 20 Questions, would be vegetable or mineral and fish are certainly neither of those.

I tried explaining that pescatarians eat fish, but not vegetarians. That got me nowhere. This confusion about the animal kingdom ranks up there, in my mind, with the girl who told me she thought beans were meat (as Davey Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up). It took every ounce of self-control I have not to burst out laughing or screaming. Beans come from plants. They do not have blood, a brain or eyes. Beans are not animals (kingdom=plantae).

Sometimes I hardly know whether to laugh or weep.