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RSS FeedGreat question posed by Steve in the General Tso post–why is America so obsessed with white meat, and i’ve been fascinated by the fact that more than one commenter has brought God into the discussion. And still another suggests that God’s own preference is for dark meat (whether God eats meat, of course, is a more difficult, and interesting question–my guess is yes).
Steve wrote:
Why do Americans (I am American, but my parents are from Taiwan) generally seem to prefer white meat? Note Perdue’s obsession with breeding chickens with disproportionately large breasts, the ubiquitous use of "all white meat chicken" as a marketing ploy among chain restaurants, and the significant disparity in price between breast meat and leg/thigh meat in markets. In most of Asia (anyone know about other continents?) the preference is reversed. American "foodies" also seem to prefer dark meat. I have difficulty understanding how *anybody* could prefer white meat. What are the preferences of the readers of this blog, and can anyone explain to me the attraction of white meat?
Surely there are numerous reasons for America’s slavish devotion to fatless, tasteless protein. But I’d wager one of those reasons is that many don’t know how to cook dark poultry meat correctly. It needs more cooking to make it tender.
Chef and educator Bob DelG:
…white meat is in large part determined by that (big)part of the American zeitgeist that is rooted in puritanism and which eschews everything that is not clean, simple and directed towards G-d.
Of course, I think it’s bullsh-t.
On the other hand, I would not advocate the use of dark chicken meat for everything. While it certainly had no place in a dish like General Tso, I’d cringe before a poached leg of pullet in aspic (yuck!).
Dinergirl (committed cooks, check out her French Laundry Cookbook blog):
I think the white meat/dark meat thing is totally a Jesus thing. Or not. Honestly, I’m sure it has to do with fat content and the misguided notion that dark meat is bad for you. Also, during the Depression, people had to eat dark meat because it was cheaper, so perhaps that negative association still exists. I love me some dark meat.
The breast should probably be reserved for uses in hospitals and for people recovering from life threatening G-I illnesses. America needs more instruction on how to use the best parts of the bird.
I’ll lean toward the health aspect for the reason why people steer clear of it. That’s based on all the articles in the media that I’ve read about losing weight and preventing heart disease. Plus, my uncle is a butcher at a supermarket, and he’s told me his customers tell him they don’t want the dark meats and marbled beef because of their health concerns.
But my opinion is based on what I’ve read, and experienced. I’m sure people have different opinions as to why based on what they’ve read and/or heard.
I don’t know if American’s are more obsessed with white meat, as a whole, than other cultures. In France, it’s far more common to see turkey and chicken breasts than it is to see dark meat. In fact, I rarely see chicken thighs for sale at butchers. (Which makes me wonder…where are they going?)
But in general, I think people like white meat chicken breasts, 1) Because they’re easier to prepare when sold in boneless breasts, 2) Because they have less fat, and 3) Because some people are freaked out by seeing that what they’re eating was actually once an animal, like those people who can’t eat fish or shrimp served with the heads on.
#1, Yes, they are easy to prepare.
#2 They’re marginally less in fat than dark meat (although perhaps people could put less whipped cream in their mochaccinos and treat themselves to a bit of dark meat once in a while.)
#3 This I have no answer to.
Those people are just plain weird. If you’re going to eat meat or poultry, stop flipping out about what you’re eating.
Well Nick and DinerGirl, I did say that the subject was worthy of a doctoral dissertation, didn’t I (warn you)?
I think that the cultural preferences that were born and came into force before and following the Great Depression, have a lot to do with how we behave today. Right on. One of my pet peeves is with the pre-Depression era notion that cooking with gas is always best. It’s an idea that built up so much force during the lean years of the Depression that today many otherwise pragmatic chefs think that gas stoves and ovens are intrinsically better than electric stoves and ovens.
It’s an idea that is absurd on it’s face, especially when you consider the many advantages of magnetic induction, and is partially responsible for the recent and bizarre appearance of 4K gas stoves in homes where no one ever cooks.
Nick, I think that when you look at all of the demographic characteristics of the United States, what you will find is that the biggest market for white, low- fat meat is over-represented by 2nd + generation Americans who have absorbed and adopted, the American values system with its strong Puritan roots and, by extension, aspirations.
Presumably, (perhaps presumptuously on my part) Australians would not share the belief of 2nd+ generation Americans that eating lean=>purification=>health=>physical perfection=>G-d because their values system does not have the same grounding in Puritanism.
Another thing we have to look at is the influence of racial bias in food choices. It’s a touchy subject and I’m probably a fool for bringing it up but there’s a lot of new research that indicates that people of all races prefer lighter color skin over darker skin (http://tinyurl.com/3bo4r3). Now I don’t mean to suggest that because large numbers of people think that white skin is more attractive than dark skin that the preference extends to meat. However, when you look at the way that white meat has been marketed in the States you cannot help but notice that a lot of it has pandered to racial preferences.
This unpleasant reality is the reason that the pork marketing folks damped-down their “Other White Meat” campaign in racially sensitive markets and ramped it up in markets where there are a lot of people who want aspire to the American mainstream -immigrant communities.
Are they easier to prepare? I think their the cut of meat most likely to be trashed by the home and the line cook. also the factory birds available to most are insipid, relative to the birds available in a place where people respect their food, France in particular and europe generally. i think you need a lot more finesse to cook crappy food well, finesse most people simply don’t have.
I find the people who are most insistent on boneless, skinless chicken breasts are also the people who won’t eat meat on bone and this includes steaks and pork if they eat either to begin with. These are also the people who view food as fuel. And usually fit into my husband’s assessment about diets being akin to confession and penance. Although dark meat has more flavor that’s exactly what these people don’t like about it. So I doubt you’ll ever convert a substantial amount of them.
Personally I think if you aren’t willing to eat meat on a bone you shouldn’t be allowed to eat meat.
I’m not sure that it has that much to do with sociology and ethics as it does ease of eating. Breast meat is where most of the unencumbered muscle is on the bird. Therefore, when eating and picking the bird to pieces, it is the one area that yields greatest amount with least amounts of effort. I also look to the classic drumstick as support for this theory. Here is likely one of the darkest and potentially stringiest pieces of meat in the entire bird realm. Yet whether it’s spicy chicken wings or fried chicken, these are the pieces people want. So my argument boils down to white meat is easy to eat, easy to eat trumps flavor, and God and Jesus likely wouldn’t waste their time with chicken and would go out for barbeque instead. (They don’t have to keep kosher since they are the rule makers, so it would North Carolina Pork Shoulder.)
I think there’s also a preference for white meat among the food processors’ industry because I believe I’ve read before (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), that white meat is easier to process and then mold into shapes than dark meat is. And, you know how much America loooooooves its processed food. And, I think many Americans prefer a homogenized taste to almost everything they eat, which is why they choose white meat because it, to them, “tastes like chicken”… whereas, if they actually thought about it, the dark meat tastes more chickeny (take THAT, Merriam-Webster). Sometimes when things taste too much like what they are, it becomes almost anthropomorphic to people and I think that’s what freaks people out, sad as that is.
(Thanks, MR for the blog plug — you rock! Hope to see some of you over there hashing up some good debates on what I’m trying to do.)
It could be an old economical issue; back in my previous life as a professional historian, I did a lot of oral histories, and when the question of eating came up, especially by the folks who grew up during the Great Depression, they always talked about eating the dark meat, primarily because it was affordable at the time. So I think that it’s gotten ingrained as an inferior meat, something that the economically-disadvantaged would choose, but not what someone of means would prefer, as they’d go for the breast.
Granted, that’s a simplistic view, and I suspect there’s more to it than just that, but I do believe it could be a factor.
I definitely don’t feel that white meat is easier to cook than dark meat. There’s such a small window where it’s fully cooked but not totally dry and tasteless. Maybe I feel this way because I grew up with dark meat, so I routinely overcook the white.
Also, what makes boneless skinless breast any easier to work with than boneless skinless thigh? And bone-in breast is no easier to eat than a drumstick or bone-in thigh. I don’t think ease of use/eating is the answer.
I also agree that those who have trouble eating bone-in or head-on foods should strongly consider vegetarianism. Meat eaters need to reconcile their tastes with the fact that animals must die for them. At some point all meat eaters should experience killing their own meals, too, even if it’s just catching some fish. I hate when people catch a fish and throw it back. Literally messing with them solely for our own amusement. Sheesh.
DinerGirl
I doubt that the food processing industry has any preference for chicken breasts. I think it’s the public driving the market. I’ll bet that what the processors would prefer is a public that was willing to pay 4 bucks a pound for chicken pulp -which in my twisted imagination is made from whole chickens shot through a meat grinder, bones, guts, feathers and all.
Neither do I believe that the industry has a preference for low-fat tasteless pork. Why would they?
Those lean pig breeds cost a fortune to develop, husband and market. If the public had been satisfied with the meat from the old breeds, the swineherds would have kept rearing them and saved themselves a fortune in R&D and marketing costs.
I know this sounds like I’m playing that old and tired saw of “business only gives the public what it wants” and maybe I am. But maybe it’s true.
I think that if we really want to know why there is so much lean and tasteless meat out there (and the horrible diet food and even more horrible diet books) we have to pay the most attention to what the people who buy the stuff think about themselves, what their doctors, ministers and food experts like Rachel Ray are telling them to think, and how they want their lives to proceed.
Of course that’s easy to say:doing it is another story.
For example, when I wrote that the values of the Puritans played a role in determining what people buy in the supermarket, I did so knowing that a most folks are not consciously aware that they have anything at all in common with Puritans. Jeesh, I’ll bet there are plenty who don’t even know what a Puritan is. Or, returning to your earlier observation that desires rooted in the Depression era are still with us today, think that “The Depression” is a hip-hop term for what happens when you finish your last blunt and you feel like popping a cap in your brain case because now you have nothing to soften the crash from the rock of crack you just smoked.(No what I’ sayin’?)
Anyway, the point is is that if someone wanted to identify something like the Calvinist idea that living lean is what G-d expects within the collective consciousness of some subset of American culture, he’s going to have spend a lot of time listening to what a lot of people say, identifying statements of belief and matching them to their historical roots.
And who has time for that? I know I don’t. That’s why I just say as if it were true and hope that somebody believes me.
I don’t know why people believe that chicken breast meat is easier to cook. Boneless, skinless chicken breast is the easiest cut to turn into dry, crumbly meat. You have to be very careful to cook the breast all the way through without allowing it to become dry. Boneless, skinless thighs have no such problem. You can overcook those as much as you want; they’ll still be deliciously tender and flavourful.
God eats meat alright. But he doesn’t torture and mutilate it first like we do on industrial “farms”. Except for Christmas rituals that is.
I think part of it is just that it’s easier to get those tidy food-porn-like images of neatly chopped up chicken slices with white meat than with dark meat, like thigh. You can’t that pleasant uniform appearance as easily, and let’s face it, we’re a superficial nation expecting all of our food to look as uniform as the crap being molded and sold to us as “nuggets.”
Mr. Bourdain, consider this graph:
http://bp3.blogger.com/_FBXGhy-QmVw/RclUgCusgII/AAAAAAAAAdU/CzI1AERJoqA/s1600-h/card650.JPG
Back in the late 80s when I was a teen, my father had a heart attack and the first thing the docs did was change the diet -white meat, no fat, lean cuts, less marbling, margarine instead of butter or other real dairy products, etc. (you get the picture). That was the first time that I know of the medical establishment determining what was “healthy” for the American public, regardless if it was man made or not. Nevertheless, my parents went along with it for a little while though my dad never would eat white meat – “too dry” he would say and would much rather chew on a pork chop bone. My parents finally wised up on this one and went back to real butter, regular cuts of meat, etc. The rule should be “if god (gods, mother nature, goddess or whomever) made it, you can eat it” rather than the medical establishment or society in general determining what we put in our mouths.
Actually, I prefer white meat chicken and turkey because of the texture. I actually like the fact that it’s less greasy/fatty.
However, that doesn’t mean I don’t like dark meat poultry. In fact, since I actually replace ground beef with ground turkey as a lower-fat alternative, I long ago came to the conclusion that the best ground turkey is dark meat. The reason being that when you grind up and cook turkey meat, if it’s white meat it actually has a gritty, dry texture. If it’s ground dark meat, it actually has the consistency of ground beef.
For those of us who don’t always cook things to a perfect degree of doneness (and I’d prefer overcooked to undercooked chicken), overcooked white meat tends to be flavorless and dry, and overcooked dark meat tends to have the consistency of a super-high-bounce-ball.
Puritanism, shmuritanism! Has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Americans prefer tastless white meat be it from chicken, turkeys or pork. They look for flavor to the coating on the meat. I raise my own fowl: chicken, guineas, pidgeons and butcher and cook it, but I have long ago given up serving any of it to most of my friends. “The meat tastes too strong like chicken” is the usual comment, face in a grimace. Ditto when served one of my fresh eggs. I don’t know if there is a cure for crappy palates.
skinless chicken breasts (the white meat) is very lean and yet healthy, good source of protein. Some of us are health-conscious, you know.
I do observe that most people around where I live (New England/RI) prefer white meat. I don’t – I prefer the dark meat. I love Thanksgivings because I can basically eat as much dark meat as I want uncontested!
It’s so juicy and delicious.
However, on the beef part, I do prefer a leaner cut. I just don’t like steaks that are too fatty. I don’t like the texture. I mean, it’s still good and all, but I prefer the fillet.
Ah white meat. Only way I can stand it is to employ the method I learned from Alton Brown – brine it, brine it, brine it.
But for flat out flavor, it’s got to be dark meat. I make a very good General Tsao’s Chicken – I use thigh meat and don’t batter the ever loving crap out of it. Comes out delicious.
Seems like a ridiculous argument: white vs dark meat, and God’s place in all of this. Well let’s start by saying God does’t love you if you can’t comprehend this simple phrase “everything in it’s place” I like to try to live and cook like the old world chefs who use every part of the animal. Most cultures outside of America make great use of the entire animal. In this case, General Tso’s chicken is a great preperation for the thigh meat.
Read Jim Harrison to enjoy the celebration of the chicken thigh. He notes the tons of legs and thigh shipped to Russia annually. Something has to be done with them after the boneless/skinless/tasteless breast has been removed.
My mom felt that white meat was “better” because it was more expensive, so I grew up thinking white meat was superior. I only ate dark meat on rare occasions like Thanksgiving, and was not impressed.
I didn’t “convert” until many years later, when a roommate prepared a dinner centered on dark meat. Not only was it organic and free-range, it was properly prepared! I found myself wondering where all of this FLAVOR came from.
I think those twin evils of the culinary world are to blame for our preoccupation with white meat: the perpetuation of old myths of “worth” and the continual reduction of preparation techniques the average at-home cook is exposed to.
When my husband roasts a whole chicken, the white meat is always really tasty. Other than that, it’s dark meat all the way, man. Chicken thighs are tasty and cheap.
Shhh! You are going to wreck it for those of us with tastebuds.
As it happens, thighs are not cheap here; they run about $5.50 a pound on a good day.
People who like breast meat exclusively probably have never had anything better than a mass produced bird that is less than 6 weeks old and doesn’t have much to offer, anyway. They put stuff all over it to make it taste like something. If all you have in mind is salsa or apricot jam or spicy bread crumbs, then the walking-toilet-paper chicken breast is less competition.
Marlies
I could not disagree with you more. Why people do the things they do today is complicated and strongly motivated by their beliefs. And a lot of what we believe comes down through history. Even the stuff that comes into our brains from “the media” is tainted by ideas that are very, very old.
So when you say “Puritanism, shmuritanism! Has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Americans prefer tasteless white meat” you are denying that Puritanism has had an impact on modern American thinking.
Now, you can do that, that’s your right. But if you do you attempt to rebut a consensus of hundreds of scholars reached over hundreds of years of study and discussion.
I’m also a bit miffed that you chose to narrow the focus of what I wrote in a way that assumes that I said that the Puritan idea that simplicity and self-denial leads to a state more plaesing to G-d is the only thing driving the current mania for low fat meat.
If you look at my fist post on the subject, I indicated that this was a big topic and worthy of a doctoral dissertation. In fact I believe that you inadvertently hit on another reason why so many people prefer bland, low fat meat, conditioning. People prefer to eat what they have been conditioned to eat.
I used to work with a guy who was a poissonier (fish cook) and hated to eat fish. When I’d ask him “why don’t you eat fish?” (which I did a lot)
He’d say “I wasn’t raised on it.”
Hello Bob,
there was nothing inadvertent about my remarks. You call is conditioning, I call it crappy palates, caused by years of eating mother’s cooking.
Years ago (long before anyone had ever heard of any cooks except Julia and Graham maybe) I had a cooking show on the local network “Cooking with Herbs”. In it I harped with Teutonic insistence on trying new things in the kitchen like fresh garlic, fresh herbs, fresh fish, god forbid! (that excluded catfish prolifically present in local ponds, a familiar in other words. I told my audience that with all things unfamiliar you at first reject them, but if you keep trying you will eventually tolerate and peu a peu embrace them.
I know whereof I speak as I was raised in a household where the mother, although a good cook, made the same dishes year-in and out, never once venturing into a new territory.
BTW, few people hereabouts have heard of the Puritans. I checked!
Okay Marlies, a truce!
Some people are conditioned to have crappy palates!
And forget the Puritans, I never liked them anyway. Now back to my boeuf en daube.
You are giving people (especially women) far too much credit. They don’t like dark meat because they can see it. Hide it well and not many people will know they are eating it. Serve chicken salad with a few dark chunks…… a few won’t eat it, while others will pick out the dark spots. Nothing covered with that much mayo can taste differently based on its color.
I love roasted chicken thighs. In fact, I would rather eat thigh meat any day than the bland breast meat. You can always find chicken thighs on sale too. They’re moist and meaty and taste great with Fava beans and a nice Chianti! ;o)
It’s simple (I think). White = good. Dark = bad. You can call it Puritanism or you can call it elitism or you can call it racism. The result is the same: we who prefer dark meat get to buy it at attractive prices. Chalk one up for open-minded cooks!
The trouble with any discussion of relationships between various antique cultural ideas and contemporary behavior is a that these old ideas reside mostly in the subconscious, and are expressed idiosyncratically. Add to this the fact that not everyone has been equally exposed, while others may have suppressed or reasoned unwanted ideas into oblivion, and small wonder that there has been so much dissent regarding my assertion that many Americans are expressing the Puritan imperative when they choose low-fat food and diets.
But I believe there are twinned cultural ideas that almost everyone expresses regardless of race, ethnicity, level of education and income: awareness of the primitive and the cannibal urge.
People all over are both horrified and fascinated by the specter of the primitive in everyday life and by the atavistic urge to eat human flesh.
Setting aside the topic of cannibalism for now, I am sure that no one will disagree with me (LOL)when I suggest that many people fear dark meat because its musky, slightly gamy aroma reminds them of things they would rather not acknowledge viz., their primitive selves. Same goes for anyone who turns away an order of fish that comes with eyes to stare back at them to remind them, perhaps, that this fish has been killed to feed them.
The other side of this argument of course is that some of us, rejoice of our primitive nature, and happily feast away on whole spitted pigs, blood sausages and live shellfish. And some of us, albeit increasingly fewer each year, even hunt and slaughter our own meat. (I don’t hunt anymore, unless you call fishing “hunting.”)
And about the urge to eat people I will say only this for now: there are lots of foods that look like people or parts of people, but most of them are candy. Obviously, we still like the idea of eating people, but only in the extremely abstract. If this was not the case then, wouldn’t we be exchanging anatomically correct human hearts made out of say, liver, on valentines day?
Oh and back to the Puritan thing. If anyone does not believe that the Calvinist imperative to live simply and in opposition to the decadent, morally duplicitous, ways of old-Europe has no bearing on the way we live today, then just take a look at the different ways that the French and we have reacted to the scandalous behavior of these two state leaders: Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac.
Millions of neo-Puritans here freaked when Clinton’s dalliances with Monica Lewinksy became known. But as I write Chirac, who is just as married as Clinton, is telling the world about his mistresses with barely a “non” to be heard from the French press.
ep,
Have you considered bison? I had a bison strip steak on New Year’s Eve and I am a convert. Whenever possible, I use bison instead of beef. The flavor is beefy, but more so, if that makes sense. It’s leaner and lower in fat and cholesterol than commercial beef. Best of all, bison can’t be factory farmed and they can’t/won’t eat corn. The only thing you have to remember is to not cook it past medium.
People are afraid of dark meat because it has too much flavor. Kids will almost always choose less challenging food and choose bland over flavorful (except for sweets) and some people never grow out of it. But *why* people shy away from intense flavors is a mystery to me.
You biatches that eat breasts meat are nuthin but lesbians.
I know this is an old topic, but one I have often wondered about myself. It could have something to do with Puritanism. Somewhere down the line the knarlier aspects of dark meat were identified with things not as simple, fresh and pure as white meat. Which might in turn have something to do with Americans’ desire to get as far away from real food as possible. With the explosion of convenience and processed foods in the last 30 years, many people from the younger generations have not had to get up close and personal with a dead animal, and consider bones, sinews and cartilage to be gross and something to be avoided. These things are not present in a simple chicken breast, which has already been removed from the bones and other knarly parts of the chicken before it even reaches their fingertips. I know some people who when faced with a chicken leg cut off half of the meat and leave the rest lest they have to face the bones and cartilage. We all know of people who love fish filets but if it’s served to them whole with the head on make a face and won’t eat it. Well, it’s now extending to chicken as a result of people not being forced to get over the reaction.
Another thing I just realized is how awful the average chicken is out there. The battery hens one gets in the supermarket are of vastly inferior quality to those that foodies and organic enthusiasts prefer. Battery hens are raised on junk and many have been previously frozen before they reach the store, and what suffers the most taste and consistency-wise from this is dark meat. We all know what dark meat looks like that has been frozen. It is not appetizing and so I don’t blame people from being put off from it. If they could only gravitate to the more gourmet and natural brands of poultry they might discover a new appreciation for dark meat. The same people I’ve seen avoid dark meat from a battery hen will pick the bones clean from a free range organic bird.
There are some interesting theories posted here, and while I am belatedly entering the fray, some points need to be raised. First, as to the Puritans. I graduated with a History Degree, and flavored it later with a law degree. I have a fair amount of knowledge about what the Puritans did, and didn’t do, because of the ol’ educational training. Before we blame the Puritans for our eating bland meat, please consider what THEY ate. Not much of what they “grew up” with was available to them in the new country, or at least it wasn’t prepared the same way. They ate a lot of venison (mostly deer, although some elk and a larger version of antelope were also available), some turkey (which is part of the reason why we keep them around in our culture, ya know, the thanksgiving thing) and a lot of fish (they initially populated the coastal areas, because they were available thanks to a huge die off of the indiginous folks – the europeans inadvertantly [at least at first] killed them off with viruses they never before encountered), maize and a few assorted greens. The Puritans also drank a lot of beer and ale (something they “grew up” with, because the european water sources were already fairly polluted, and they didn’t trust the water found here at first), but not wine or other “spirits,” which they disdained as leading to drunkeness. Betcha most of you folks didn’t know they liked Beer! What is recited above indicates a LACK of fastidiousness on their part. They liked both white and dark meat because…they needed to SURVIVE (they lost over 50% of their population the first year that they were here). So let us NOT blame the Puritans for our apparent cultural antagonism for darker meat. Also, while it was true that Gov. Bradford did order up a feast for their having survived the first year plus, the actual thanksgiving feast was in September (right after the first harvest), and consisted of a lot of deer, fish and SOME Turkey. It was President Abraham Lincoln who determined that a Thanksgiving feast be observed on the fourth Thursday of November, because he had just come back from dedicating a certain cemetary in Pennsylvania in 1863 (yep, Gettysberg) and had just determined (to himself) that the Union was likely to win which then inspired his proclamation for Thanksgiving. OK, enough about that. Puritan ascetisism did not exist to the degree that we ascribe to them today. They ate everything they could get their hands on, so they could make it to the next year. They even adapted to some of the indiginous fare, since THOSE folks were still alive. So let’s leave the Puritans out of the debate, especially since they’re not around to defend themselves!
Now as for some of the other points raised. There is a BIG difference between pre-Depression and post-Depression cultural views on food and other things, some of which have little to do with the actual Depression. Let us also not forget the event that took us OUT of the Depression, World War Two. The War, with the resulting limitations on the use of LOTS of things (butter, milk, gasoline, oil, tires, et cetera), had a profound effect on American culture. The Depression, because most folks couldn’t afford things, and then the war, because we needed to provide for our soldiers fighting on two fronts abroad. Over twenty years combined of denial of the finer things in life. I would pose that THAT had a profound effect on our cultural way of looking at things (like how to prepare meat, what meat to eat, et cetera) than did how the Puritans looked at things. This time in US history was ALSO the first time that “we” recognized how disease works, particularly in how our food was made, stored and prepared (the FDA didn’t come into existance until the early 20th century, and we had a lot of people in our national population affected by food poisoning until the government stepped in [and before you go blaming Democrats for that, remember that the FDA was formed under President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican]). Such an issue would have much more of a profound impact on people choosing what food to eat and how to prepare it, and it did – right through World War Two! I write these things not to disparage some of the deeper thoughts (like, are we dealing with a latent racial discrimination by our collective choice of white meat over dark), but to provide some clarity to the argument – plus it would be nice if we stopped picking on the poor old Puritans!
DaveM, interesting comments. I agree that what is attributed to Puritanism is actually our own evolved interpretation of it after several hundred years of social influences, including the Victorian era, the Great Depression and two World Wars. A lot of people don’t realize that and so in modern mythology the Puritans are made responsible for a lot of cultural attitudes that don’t really belong to them.
But then again I don’t think the original post by BobdG was necessarily referring to literal Puritanism as believed in and practiced by the actual Puritans, but the metaphorphosed “Puritanism” that we have evolved to possess within our collective cultural psyche after several hundred years and intervening influences such as I mention above. At least that’s how I took it. It would be interesting to hear what Bob might have to say about this, but he’s probably not looking at this page anymore.