Red Meat, White Lies

In Old English times, the term "meat" meant any edible food. During the medieval period this definition narrowed to only land animals.

This inevitably arose out of religious dictums forbidding consumption of certain land animals on particular days of observance.

Some maintain that definition today and some take it a step further, employing the term "meat" to denote only red meat, e.g., beef or lamb. It's astounding how arbitrary our definitions of things are.

Even more fascinating, a capricious definition, as opposed to the true nature of the entity, can wield tremendous influence over peoples' reaction to it.

Somehow society has generated a conception of red meat as bad and white meat as good. The pork industry, endeavoring to capitalize on this misguided, health-crazed vilification of red meat, now purports pork as the "new white meat".

By definition, meat is animal flesh, any animal, particularly its muscular tissue.

I emphasize the muscular structure because with the exception of organ meats, when you eat beef, chicken, pork, lamb, venison, fish, snails, crabs, or even a rattlesnake, you are consuming the muscular structure of that animal.

Nevertheless, current dichotomous thinking distinguishes "meat" from non-meat by color. Red meat is red because of myoglobin, an iron containing protein that transfers oxygen from the blood to the muscles of the animal.

Muscles which are used more will contain more myoglobin, (since they require more oxygen), and will be redder or darker in color. Take chicken for example.

A chicken uses its legs far more than it's breast muscles and hence, they are darker. Moreover, there are different kinds of myoglobin and some are redder than others.

PH, (a measure of acidity vs. alkalinity), also affects meat color. Beef is redder than pork because of the amount and types of myoglobin and the pH. And these chemical differences are not good or bad, healthy or unhealthy.

For those that define "meat" as only red meat, color is only the surface discriminator. The underlying differentiator is usually fat content and cardiovascular health.

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