<p>This is a very weird <a href="https://www.turkiyetoday.com/lifestyle/how-stuffed-squid-survived-byzantine-monks-and-ottoman-tables-by-staying-ink-ognito-3215117?s=1">story</a> about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.</p>
<blockquote><p>At Constantinople&#8217;s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn&#8217;t answer to appetite.</p>
<p>It answered to the &#8220;typikon&#8221;: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?</p>
<p>Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn&#8217;t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass...</p></blockquote>