If pork comes from a pig, and beef comes from a cow, what comes from chicken and fish?

Fish eggs come from fish (also known as roe)

From chicken:
eggs, obviosuly
wings
breasts
thighs
giblets
gizzards
liver (chicken liver)

Well from chicken we get poultry.
From fish it’s just fish.

Chicken comes from chicken. (Poultry is just an umbrella term for several types of fowl.)

Fish comes from fish.

We just call it according to this syntax: animal+meat.
So it is cow-meat, pig-meat, chicken-meat. Except for fish, that is just called fish.

Seafood.

Here is a dimly remembered note. Someone with clearer or more recent memory of linguistic patterns (@Demosthenes)? may be able to confirm or clarify. I’m not looking all of these up because precision isn’t necessary to the point, but please correct me if you can.

We have two words for a number of animals that we regard as food. The name of the animal typically comes from the Germanic side, the Anglo-Saxon roots. So we have Kuh = cow, Schwein = swine (pigs), Schaf = sheep. The word for the meat as meat comes from the French: boeuf (beef), porc (pork), mouton (mutton).

The comment, as I recall, was that it’s more refined to use a different word for the meat as meat because it enables us to separate it from the process of turning the animal into meat: one word for the barnyard or pasture, another for the kitchen and dining room.

I’m not sure what happened to chicken and fish. Maybe we didn’t need as much distinction there because it’s easier to think of the very small animals as “other.”

^Precisely.

Words like pork, beef, and mutton are the result of borrowing the words for these animals from Old French. English already had words for pig, cow, and sheep, so the Old French words were used instead to refer to the meat of the animals rather than unnecessarily having two words for the animal itself.

We did in fact borrow the French word for chicken as pullet (meaning young hen) and poultry (which refers to various domestic fowl and their meat rather than just chicken meat).

But the French word for fish, poisson, is so similar to the word “poison”, that maybe it’s best it was never borrowed to mean “fish meat”. :P

Thanks, @Demosthenes.

Just a follow-on note: from 1066, the French (Normans) were the conquerors of England, so they became the ruling class. The Saxons were subordinate, even though a Saxon aristocracy did remain. So it typically would have been the Saxons working the pastures and barnyards, with the French-speaking Normans being served in the dining rooms.

One of the linguistics textbooks I read some years back (Otto Jespersen, I think) pointed out that even if the Normans occupied the great halls, their offspring were tended by Saxon nannies, and so the youngsters grew up speaking the language of the native population; hence it was English and not French that became (remained) the speech of the land—although French left its mark everywhere; and especially in the language of the law, government, and the military, which were well-organized Norman institutions that barely existed among the Saxons.

Again, please, correct me if I’ve got it wrong.

Reminds me of a story my brother’s friend. His four year old son said, “Dad how come there’s chicken that’s an animal and there’s also chicken that we eat?”

Chicken – -> Nuggets

Fish – - – - > Sticks

Poultry and seafood.

Sashimi

Soylent green.