It was generally understood, growing up Catholic in St. Paul, that you ate fish on Fridays as a form of sacrifice. For one day, you were to set aside the self-indulgence and the faintly sin-sullied physical satisfactions of dripping hamburgers and bleeding steaks for the prim virtues of a fillet of fish.
There were still dangers, even then. There was a smell we called “fishiness,” with distantly poisonous associations. And there was, of course, the widely acknowledged scourge of asphyxiation by tiny translucent bones.