The Other White Meat
For minor health and ethical reasons, I don’t eat red meat–I only eat chicken and fish. In the latter case, I try to eat free-range chicken and non-farmed fish. Regardless, when I’m explaining my culinary choices to people, this conversation inevitably occurs:
ME: I don’t eat red meat.
THEM: You’ll have some pork then?
ME: No, I don’t eat pork, only chicken and fish.
THEM: But pork’s the other white meat.
ME: That’s just marketing.
This is a classic example of marketing-speak insinuating itself into our culture so that it becomes a pseudo-fact. “The other white meat” was part of a very successful $54 million marketing program that started in 1986. Don’t believe me? Go visit (and I kid you not) http://www.otherwhitemeat.com, brought ot you by the NPB. That’s the National Pork Board for the acronym-challenged.
I’m not some kind of vegan terrorist or anything. I’d like people to eat ethically, but that’s not my point. My point is is that people seemed to have embraced this largely-false notion that suggest that pigs have more in common with chickens than they do with cows. Clearly, on the great food chain of life, the cow and pig and siblings, while the chicken is a distant cousin. The NPB deserves real credit, because they really seem to have modified consumers’ beliefs with regards to their product–a tall order.
I note that the Pork site has a gallery of over a hundred images of pork. That’s a lot of pork pics.
That pork site is kind of an adult companion piece to that favourite of teen beef sites, brought to us by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Man, you could cut the sexual double-entendres in this post with a knife, couldn’t you?
John Keyes 
Pfister 
Imo 
