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Italy - Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is a fish day at the market. Ergo, many families in Italy will be eating fish today.
At first glance it certainly does seem arbitrary that an entire nation will tend toward a certain food on a given day. What's more, fish on Tuesday is not really questioned, it is a normal thing that happens, naturally, rhythmically, every week.
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Then again, in Italy some apparently arbitrary things actually do have a reason for being. (The reverse, "In Italy many supposedly reasonable things are actually completely arbitrary" is also true). Fish on Tuesday is due to the fact that A) Friday is FISH DAY (Catholic tradition) and B) fishermen can't live off of just one outing a week. Thus it was decided that Tuesday would be the other fish day. (Given prep time two outings a week was probably the limit for independent fishermen of the pre-industrial fishing world.) So to this day on these two mornings the boats come in with the fresh catch, which then reaches the markets, which are then full of all kinds of freshly caught fish and shellfish.
That said, Italians certainly do eat fish on other days. It's just that satisfying your fresh fish craving on Monday evening for example is probably not the best idea. Better to wait 'till Tuesday and eat fish with everyone else . .
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--contributed by GB, editor, Italian Notebook
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