Nice try Arthur..
But that would mean they did not eat the REAL ACTUAL flesh of Jesus..that means it was as many church Fathers said SPIRITUAL..not PHYSICAL
Since this was done at the Passover, where eating the lamb was essential to the ritual under the Old Covenant, and since Jesus was the Lamb about to be sacrificed (He carried his cross at the same hour as the lambs were being slaughtered all over Jerusalem.) it makes perfect sense that eating the Lamb would be an essential part of the ritual in the New Covenant. St. John in particular emphasizes that Jesus is replacing the old Passover with a new Passover, the old lamb with the Lamb of God (himself), the old sacrament with a new sacrament.
Remember Arthur that the Lamb they ate was not THE REAL ACTUAL PASSOVER LAMB.. it was the symbolic lamb.. a remembrance of the actual passover
Here though is where the author of the OP (and apparently you and anyone else who agrees with this line of reason) err.
What the author is saying is, basically, that if the Fathers taught of a "spiritual Eucharist" (which they did) then that means they didn't teach that the Eucharist was really Jesus' Body and Blood.
In other words the error here is to say that something that is "spiritual" isn't really real, or that the only way something can be real is if it's "physically real"
Of course we know as people of faith, that spiritual things can be (and in fact are) just as real as physical things. So once we all stop making the axiomatic error of "the only real thing is a physical thing" the words of the Fathers become clearer, to whit: they believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, they simply believed He was/is really present in a spiritual sense.
Now it is true (as I've said on another thread) that indeed no Early Church Father explicitly taught the Dogma of Transubstantiation, however again as I said before this is not concerning as the Dogma wasn't defined until after all of the Fathers here had passed on. So it's not expected that any one (early) Father would have taught the entire dogma explicitly. But it's roots, it's foundation can certainly be found throughout their writjngs as a collective work, and certainly we at least see most taught the Eucharist was more than a mere symbol, rather that it is a "Sacrament", which is both a symbol and that which it symbolizes.