What is the common word for chicken, fish, pork, beef etc?

Food Staple . Protein. Invertebrates.

@talljasperman If someone says “Buy me…, I don’t care if it is chicken, beef, pork,or fish”. What goes in the blank?

Meat products?
Food?
Expensive?

Tasty animal flesh.

Don’t tell me there is no word, how can it be?

Animal protein.

Supper?

@gailcalled but what if I had no idea what protein is, and if I were the one who is being asked to do the shopping?

Then the person spells it out.

Buy 2 lbs. of beef steak, 4 chicken breasts, fillet of sole, 6 pork chops, a dozen eggs, half a pound of cheese.

@gailcalled “a dozen eggs, half a pound of cheese.” These are not flesh of animals though. Please forget the protein thing.

By the way, in addition to the ones I mentioned, add buffalo meat, turkey, duck, etc.
No shrimp, and the like.

Non-vegan food?
What’s wrong with “meat” or even “animal products”?

I call them all meat.

I also sometimes say animal, I actually would only use animal when trying to describe that I try to avoid eating animal products. However, animal products includes dairy not just meat.

If you say meat, most Catholics won’t include fish.

Some people use meat to mean red meat; mammal meat only. They think in terms of meat, poultry, and fish.

How about BBQ?

Meat. That’s what they are.

Targets.

Meat. Animal protein. Flesh.

Animal protein.

Protein is too vague, in my opinion, because protein could also be other things, like nuts, cheese, tofu.

I would say “meat” is the best description.

@jca
Meat it is.

Carnivore food.

Fish is not meat.

@gailcalled
Then, what is it

nom, nom, nom, nom.

@gailcalled Fish is meat to me. Why don’t you consider it meat?

Fish is the flesh of
“a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate animal with gills and fins and living wholly in water.”.

Meat is the flesh of a mammal.

From dictionary.com

If you feel you have not yet received an adequate answer, call a butcher shop, and ask them to tell you with one word, what do they sell.

Meat. But that doesn’t include fish. Meat applies only to land animals.

@gailcalled The number one definition for meat on dictionary.com is: The flesh of animals as used for food. You said fish is animal protein. If fish is animal protein then under that definition fish is meat.

When someone says, “I don’t eat meat.” I assume they are vegetarians. Except, as I said, the Catholics usually don’t consider fish meat, because they are allowed to eat it on no meat Friday. Everyone else I have ever known uses no meat to mean nothing that ever had a face.

murdered animal

@zenvelo
Fish is meat.

Then flesh? I would say “vlees” in my language, but that’s the translation of both meat and flesh. Or just “animal”. It makes sense to me to say “I don’t eat animals” or “I like eating animals”.

Interesting though: now I get why it so often happen that foreigners do not consider fish to be meat :)

I still say “meat” but if that’s too vague, go for “meat and fish” or if referring to the meal itself, refer to it as “the entree.”

@ragingloli I disagree, and @gailcalled agrees with me and cites dictionary.com.

Talk to a pescatarian, they’ll say, “I don’t eat meat.”

@flo There is no single word in common American English usage that encompasses all that you ask and nothing more.

“Protein” doesn’t work because it includes dairy and eggs and beans.

I agree with @zenvelo . We don’t say “meat” for “fish.” There is no one word in the English language for what you want.

LET’S INVENT ONE!

“Feat” or “Mish.”

See my new question.

Where’s @Bob when I need him? Go make me a tuna meat salad sandwich. (Where is Bob?_)

@gailcalled Snowed in?

Dead.

(In Mexico City?)

Funny, I just messsaged Bob_. Another weird coincidence of late.

Did anyone bother to look up meat on dictionary.com. I wrote out the first definition. @gailcalled saying fish is animal protein is a matter of if A=B and B=C then A=C. If fish equals animal protein and animal protein equals meat then fish equals meat.

I am not saying fish is meat period, I am saying it is a valid definition. Some people don’t include fish, others do. Both definitions are correct.

I love it. Let’s go deep-sea meating.

As I was talking about in another thread, I think the idea that “fish is not meat” may have came from the religion’s huge influence on the USA. I see that as @gailcalled pointed out, there are even cultural barriers to calling things like fish meat, but culture and linguistics aside, I have no problem referring to any species from kingdom animalia as meat.
I know that doesn’t really answer the question but perhaps we can start a revolution.

@JLeslie The transitive property doesn’t work well outside of concrete, objective definitions.

@dxs Yes, the Catholic influence regarding the definition has influence. I said just that. @gailcalled isn’t Catholic, so I was surprised she and even @janbb don’t consider fish meat.

Some people think in terms of the grocery store. Often the “meat” department is separate from the fish department.

I love it to. Let’s go meat shooting. Meat hunting. Meat herding.

Mealmeat?

I’m with @gailcalled on this one, animal protein. And I would include fish in that definition.

When in doubt I recommend asking for specific details. Why muck around second-guessing? If still in doubt, repeat…

“Meat” is the most likely word you are looking for. Fish, Chicken, Beef, Pork, are all meat products.

@zenvelo Fish is a meat product. It’s not Flora, it’s Fauna. Meat.

“meat 1. Food in general; esp., solid food; hence, the edible part of anything; as, the meat of a lobster, a nut, an egg. 2. The flesh of animals used for food; specif., = flesh…” -from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 1961 ed.
Note the “lobster” part.

@JLeslie I don’t know how things are in the US, but in Australia, the Meat, Poultry and seafood departments at Coles (one of our three major super markets) are very often in the same area, as part of their deli department. If you want to get Ham (Pig), Poultry (Chicken/Turkey/Duck), and Salmon (Fish) in the same order, you generally have the same Deli assistant helping you with all three.

I think the same goes for Woolworths, and I never shop at IGA.

@bomyne In America there usually is a fish counter that is near, or even adjacent to, the meat section, but sometimes it is far from the other meats. One store I used to shop in had the fish counter adjacent to the produce and all seafood, fresh, packages, and frozen, were housed in that section (I didn’t like that set up at all). When you walked in the store (lets say the store front is south, and the back of the store north) to the right (east) there was all the fresh veggies and fruits, just beyond that (further east) the fish at the perimeter of the store. Then turning to go towards the back of the store it went into fresh deli (deli here is cooked meats and cheeses) and then packaged deli, further along the perimeter. At the back perimeter of the store you eventually got to the meat section. That was at a Schnuck’s, which was a large chain here in the US, it’s smaller now, but still exists. Kroger, a huge chain here, now occupies that space and still has that set up, but they don’t always have that set up.

I shop in Publix usually now, another very large chain here, and the fresh seafood usually is at the back perimeter, like the fresh meat is. Often the line up is the fresh seafood counter, then the frozen seafood, then the fresh meat. The deli (the hand sliced meats and cheeses, and also precooked foods for take out) are usually closer to the front of the store by the produce when you first walk in. People sometimes come in to pick up lunch, so they can quickly grab something from the deli and a piece of fruit, and pay and leave, so the location of that department at the front makes sense.

Of course if we are looking at eligions, there is also. Separation be tween meat and fish in kashruth. Fish, but not most seafood, is edible but can be eaten with dairy or meat/meat. But this is a side point.

True, if we look at religions it is another angle. Fish is pareve, but not usually consumed with other meats on the same plate as far as I know. That might vary by different Jewish groups. I am not very versed on Kosher rules. I know the Sephardic and ashkenazi often have a different set of rules for how many hours between dairy and meat is ok. The rules might vary for fish with other meats, I don’t know.

Do people say lobster meat? I actually don’t know for sure, but that rings true to me. We say alligator meat.

This is why I say there is not only one right way to look at it. How people commonly use the words varies. My sister is vegan, I would be pretty sure to her she thinks in terms of anything living with a brain is meat when on a plate to be consumed. She doesn’t differentiate between living things. Some people believe fish to be like plants in the water. That they feel no pain, that they don’t suffer while struggling to survive. To me that is ridiculous. A fish out of water I believe knows it’s dying. It flips around trying to survive. I think the lobster thrown in the boiling water also has moments of desperation. When she used to say, “I don’t eat meat,” she meant including fish. She didn’t eat animals killed for food. She was a vegetarian for humane reasons.

@JLeslie: People say lobster meat and crab meat.

Crab meat is another good example.

Right, like I said “meat” is a good word that covers these.

If you talk to a chef or a Catholic, or most average British people, fish is not meat. If you talk to a biologist, or a vegetarian, fish is meat. It’s all about context.

Apparently sometimes dictionaries are the wrong place to go for correct information.
From @kritiper‘s post quoting meat 1. Food in general; esp., solid food; hence, the edible part of anything; as, the meat of a lobster, a nut, an egg. What???
and then definition 2. The flesh of animals used for food” there it makes sense.

“Fish is a meat product. It’s not Flora, it’s Fauna. Meat.” from @bomyne‘s post.
That makes sense because it is the flesh of any kind of animal regardless of where it lives, sea or land that would include seafood too.

And the fact that Catholics don’t consider fish as meat doesn’t mean that it is not meat. According to the emperical evidence it is meat.

It seems “meat” it is!

This is a question about word usage. As with many words, what the word “meat” refers to depends on the context. Most Catholics I know would have no problem with thinking of fish as meat when they are grocery shopping and thinking of it as not meat when observing Lent or whatever, and they don’t go around trying to impose inappropriate definitions on anyone. Similarly, most people can think of human beings as animals in biology class but not animals when they call the police instead of animal control to deal with “party animal” neighbors at 3 am.

I’d say the term “meat”, if used literally and without qualification, usually applies to all and only animal flesh. It apples to things like nuts by analogy. Maybe I think that because I’m old enough to remember the old “4 food groups” that they taught us in elementary school (not defending it, just saying how it relates to usage).

Non-veg food