Seafood

Seafood is generally defined as all edible marine animals that are not vertebrates. Typical seafood includes mussels and aquatic snails, squid and squid, shrimp, crab, lobster, and lobster. Seafood can be caught or farmed products.

This designation indicates a clearly agrarian understanding of the use of the sea, as it ideally developed in the Mediterranean region, especially in Italy. The Romans, in particular, understood this food as a blessing of the seas and their gods, as evidenced, for example, by the repeated appearance of the mussel in ancient mythology. In Christian veneration of the saints, the shell was equally adopted (see scallop shell). Even in Baroque and Rococo architecture, the shell, as a perfect product of nature, was chosen as one of the outstanding ornaments, along with other plant motifs (see rocaille).

According to traditional Jewish dietary laws, seafood, because it does not have scales, is generally considered ritually unclean (tame) and therefore does not appear in the kosher diet.

The term seafood is narrower than the English seafood: seafood includes all edible animals and plants from the sea, i.e. also fish, marine mammals and algae.