The Gun Counter

Why have we broken the chains of the whiteness that bound us to fatally tasteless white bread while still remaining imprisoned in the white-meat turkey ghetto?

A friend was trying to convince me that in fact America has lost its taste for this tasteless meat, but the Sunday before Thanksgiving I was listening to the CBS all-news radio station in New York City, and they were doing a fluff piece on the turkey buying that was peaking that weekend. And the reporter was interviewing some guy from Stew Leonard's, a food mega-store that serves New York City's sophisticated suburbs and exurbs in Westchester County and Fairfield County, Conn.

And the guy was boasting that his turkeys were "bred to have 18 to 22 percent more white meat." After which the CBS announcer made a stupid wisecrack about breasts that alone would make you want to forgo the silicone-textured mega-butterballs.

And these are ciabatta-bread people, not Wonder Bread people! Do they still associate white meat with refinement? It was enough to make me wonder whether there could be a racial, if not racist, subtext here. Perhaps there is a clue in the shifting fate of the "other white meat"—pork. I'll never forget the moment when I learned the antebellum racial origin of the phrase "living high on the hog." I had driven down the I-5 "grapevine," that fog-shrouded mountainous interior route from San Francisco to L.A. with a couple of Communist Party women who were mothers of death row prisoners (long story). When dawn broke and we arrived in Watts, they guided me to a place called Ray's Redwood City, an all-night, almost all-black joint where the ladies of Saturday night dined with the ministers of Sunday morning (not at the same tables), and my fellow travelers ordered me a dish called "high on the hog," a mountain of scrambled eggs topped by a fried pork chop.

It was then I learned the etymology of the phrase in America. It hails from the plantation days, when the white slave owners dined on choice pork chops cut from "high on the hog" while the slaves made do with the lower parts of the pig—the ham hocks, the pigs feet, the pork bellies, and the innards. White meat was high on the hog, but not higher on flavor than other (often darker) cuts. Indeed the "other white meat" now available most frequently in lean and tasteless pork chops and cutlets has little more taste than white meat turkey.

Windy Wilson wrote:Let's not forget that racist anthem, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas."

Darrell wrote:Your whiteness sickitates me. This brings to mind those who complain about black holes being called, well, black holes.