Fridays in Lent

[damont]

I usually end up with a fish sandwich for lunch on Lenten Fridays, such as today. While eating lunch today, I was reminded of something that happened back in high school.

Allentown is close enough to Philadelphia to make school field trips to the latter feasible. One March during high school, the Franklin Institute had a new exhibit that we went on a field trip to see. The Institute, at that time, had a McDonalds attached to serve the fast-food cravings of their patrons. We went on a Friday, and discovered that quite a few of the Catholic high schools in Philadelphia had had the same idea.

Nobody, it seems, bothered to warn the McDonalds management. By 11:30 that morning, the hordes of Catholic high school students had completely devoided the McD's of all traces of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches; I think maybe three high schools worth actually got fish, and the other dozen or so schools were pretty much S.O.L. Word got back to those of us heading up for lunch about 12 noon that they were out. Luckily, most Catholic high school field trips have at least one priest along doing chaperone duty; those high schoolers still in line were swiftly granted a dispensation by the priest that had come along with them. It *still* felt weird to be eating burgers on a Lenten Friday, though.

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

In high school, the Model United Nations Summet took place during Lent every year, and the Friday night dinner was always chicken with pasta and uninspired veggies, and they always got the Archdiocese to grant a dispensation for the Cathloics. It was my first time actually seeing eating restrictions in practice rather than hearing about them in the abstract.

[weatherman2111.livejournal.com]

I hope none of them had fries. They were probably fried in lard at the time and if not in lard they had a beef extract in the oil for flavor...

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

The fries at that time were probably cooked in beef tallow (not pork lard), but I'm pretty sure we'd all been told about that during religion classes and knew to avoid them.

It is remotely possible that McD's and other fastfood joints actually changed to oil frying during Lent in the more Catholic-heavy areas of the country, but I don't think it's likely. We just didn't eat fastfood fries on no-meat days.

[weatherman2111.livejournal.com]

Ahh, ok. Beef lard, pork lard, still animal fat.