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Everybody’s got a preference.

Lots of Americans shy away from dark meat, both at Thanksgiving and the drive-thru. The health conscious choose white over red, the humane prefer fish to mammals. And I’ve got an uncle who refuses to ingest anything that eats worms.

Point is, modern supermarkets have allowed us to become a picky lot. But do any of us really know the difference?

If pork’s the other white meat, why is ham pink? If fish is generally considered white, why are tuna and salmon red? What’s all that black gunk in chicken wings?

And, uh, what is human flesh considered? Not that you would ever… what you mean to say is… you know, hypothetically…

Grandma Likes the Dark Meat

Not like that, you jerk. In fact, my grandmother will tell anyone who wants to hear it what she thinks of “the coloreds.” But then, she’s not very fond of the rest of the world either. One Thanksgiving, she told us the story of how she tried to help a mouse out of her laundry basin by filling it up with water. When the treading, drowning mouse still couldn’t get out, she drained the tub and clubbed the thing to death with a hammer.

“God helps those who help themselves,” she said. “Pass the dark meat.”

But enough about Grandma. The difference between dark meat and white meat has everything to do with what that piece of flesh used to do back when it was a muscle.

There are basically two kinds of muscle: slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Slow-twitch is used for sustained activity, while fast-twitch is the fight-or-flight muscle, designed for quick bursts of action.

Chicken, Chicken, Chicken

Think about your everyday chicken. It spends the majority of its life walking around on two legs (slow-twitch). Sure, it has wings and it can use ‘em, but flying is really more of an escape plan (fast-twitch) than a preferred mode of travel.

Slow-twitch fibers require a constant supply of oxygen to keep them going. To store this oxygen, a chicken’s body utilizes an iron- and oxygen-binding protein called myoglobin – as do most other vertebrates. Since it’s heavily pigmented, muscles with lots of myoglobin are darker, thus dark meat. Myoglobin is related to hemoglobin, the iron and oxygen-binding protein in red blood cells.

Since fast-twitch muscle is made to get the chicken out of a scratch, it’s powered by a fast-access, ah-hell-naw molecule called glycogen. But this immediate glucose reserve source isn’t pigmented like myoglobin, so the muscles a chicken uses to skedaddle end up white.

Now, as anyone that’s ever paid 25-cents for a hot sauce-slathered wing at a volunteer fire department knows, chicken wings aren’t the best examples of white meat. The closer you get to the bone, the less white-bread it gets. And this is especially true for the two-parted ulna/radius piece that’s sort of impossible to eat without either wasting a lot of meat or threading your tongue through the bones like some sort of sexual deviant.

But while you may think “wing” when you think of flight, realize that a chicken wing is basically just something on which to stick some flight feathers. The breast is what pumps the wing, which is why breast meat is white and chicken wings are, well, 25-cents and best enjoyed with half a gallon of blue cheese dressing.

(Chicken McNuggets, the KFC Double Down – it’s all white now. If you’re wondering what America does with the rest of its chicken, check out Nadia Arumugam’s “The Dark Side of the Bird.” Hint: we used to ship it off to Russia, but ol’ Putin’s puttin’ an end to that.)

Red Meat & White Meat

So here’s one way to tell the difference between red meat and white meat. One is red in color before cooking.  This obviously includes beef and venison (deer meat). White meat is that which is pale before cooking, such as chicken, turkey and pork.

Except… the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines red meat as all meat obtained from livestock, since it has more myoglobin than chicken or fish. And that includes pork.

Aside from its uncooked color, pork is known as “The Other White Meat” thanks to an advertising agency’s rather successful campaign in the late 80s to capitalize on the American public’s growing association of white meat as healthier. Pigs, as you’ll see below, have more myoglobin than white meat animals, they are just more prone to lounge around than cows, resulting in lighter meat. “Laziness” is bred though. So, too, is the thousand pound porker. Cut into a wild boar from the Smoky Mountains who spends every day running and you’ll find a gamier, darker variety of pork.

Now to get specific, the veracity of red meat comes down to the concentration of myoglobin. And for that, I’ll just trust the labs at Iowa State:

It’s true, many fish are white meat. Think tilapia, flounder and cod. Because fish live in water, they have the luxury of not needing to support their bodies at all times, like a chicken on its legs. That means less need for the myoglobin-sporting marathon muscles. So when you rip out the guts of a delicious bass, you’re left with tender long flanks of white meat. Though, as with the chicken and its drumsticks, you’ll find redder, more myoglobin-y meat near the end of the tail and the pectoral fins.

Of course, many fish have red flesh. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are red meat. Because nothing is easy.

Tuna, salmon, marlin, shark… These fish have cuts that can range from pink to red to purple. One quick way to group them is to say that, especially in the case of sharks, these are fish that swim a helluva lot. (Which you know by now to mean more slow-twitch, myoglobin-fueled muscles.)

This is also why ostriches – and other rattites like emus and rheas – have red meat, despite being poultry. As flightless birds, ostriches do a lot of running on those drumsticks and the wings get action as rudders, helping them maneuver at speeds of up to 40 mph. They also use their legs to kick. (And presumably stretch.)

Bringing it back to fish, another complicating factor in categorization is that it doesn’t all have to do with myoglobin. Salmon flesh, for instance, is more pink in color as a result of the animal’s diet on carotenoid-rich krill. But as any reader of Michael Pollan knows, our farmed salmon aren’t getting their natural carotenoids – because, of course, we’re trying to teach them to eat corn.

And though making salmon eat corn makes about as much evolutionary sense as dogs eating peas and flax seed, we’re fixing the pink-flesh-problem by adding canthaxanthin to their feed. (While it sounds positively toxic, canthaxanthin is a naturally occurring carotenoid – albeit, not natural for most salmon – that is also used in oral tanning pills for humans. Fun fact: eat too many of those pills and you’ll get canthaxanthin retinopathy, which turns your retinas yellow.)

What’s the Deal with Veal?

Veal is a young calf bred for one purpose, human consumption. They’re usually fed only milk or formula and often confined in crates to make sure connective tissues and slow-twitch muscles don’t develop. This makes for more tender and paler meat, leading many to consider veal a white meat.

But since you know that calves grow up to be cows and cows are red, that makes veal red, too. Genetically, they’re composed mostly of slow-twitch, myoglobin-heavy muscles – they just never use ‘em, so they’re lighter in color, like a chicken breast.

The Forbidden Flesh

A buddy of mine used to sign yearbooks, “It’s all pink inside – Critter.” We thought it hilarious and before his time. And we even learned its truth when another buddy once accidentally shot Critter in the stomach with a 3-inch-blowdart. But everyone has one of those stories from elementary school, am I right?

Actually, when it comes to human meat, it’s all red inside. To verify this, I talked to one friend who sees the insides of bodies while their alive (a doc) and one who sees the insides of bodies once they’re dead, in some of the worst ways imaginable (a coroner). Both agree that human meat is red as all get out. And uniformly so, from the biceps to the abdominals.

This makes sense, myoglobin-ly speaking. (And it’s backed up by this human muscle/myoglobin analysis.) Humans are more like cows than chickens. We use almost all of our body every day, standing up, sitting down, walking around, lifting things. It’s rare that we have to sprint or leap and we don’t have any huge muscles reserved for just one motion. Which is to say, the thigh can help you run away from a bear, but it also helps you cut the grass and bowl.

Just one caveat: the Polynesians referred to man-flesh as “long pig” and they know a lot more about cannibalism than either of my fancy-degreed friends, neither of whom have ever had “the hunger.”

So now you’re probably wondering why you invested all this time in an article that promised to tell you the difference between dark meat, white meat and red meat, and all you got was this lousy t-shirt with myoglobin all over it. But thems the breaks. There are no easy answers when it comes to the matter of meat. Just be glad I spared you the conversation of good vs. bad cholesterol and which meats will or won’t give you cancer and whether or not the rural Chinese really eat dogs. (Oh, they do.)

Bittel Me More: A Few More Myoglobin Facts

1. When you cut into meat, that juice on your plate isn’t blood, it’s water mixed with myoglobin.

2. When meat browns, it goes through a chemical reaction. Myoglobin’s iron atom is bound to a dioxygen molecule (02) that’s red in color. When you sear or grill it, it puts this molecule under duress, causing the iron atom to shed an electron and taking the oxidation state from +2 to +3. The myoglobin is then technically metmyoglobin.

3. It’s possible to avoid this chemical change through the cooking process and end up with pink meat, but only through the use of nitrites. In ham, bacon, hot dogs and bologna, curing salts (and their nitrites) convert myoglobin into nitrosomyoglobin which is bright red. When heated, nitrosomyoglobin turns into nitrosohemochrome, which is pink. Nitrites also prevent bacteria from growing, like botulism. So, that’s cool.

4. When red meat turns brown at the grocery store, it hasn’t necessarily gone bad. Again, it’s just chemical changes happening in the myoglobin. Vacuum-packed beef will actually appear purple, only turning red when oxygen hits the myoglobin – which is then actually oxymyoglobin.

5. All the above myoglobin factoids brought to you by Misconception Junction

 

Today’s question brought to you by Anoop R. – whom I will leave slightly anonymous in case he doesn’t want his name to come up in Google searches for cannibalism.

 

Chicken wing image courtesy of Kriegerscience.wordpress.com

Image via Kevin Eaves, www.motherearthnews.com