Journalism

Neato. I got mentioned by James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web.

Yes, I am getting all fanboy-like. Sue me.

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Meanwhile, blogger Warner Todd Huston notes a two-year-old Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum, in which Rosenbaum argues that it’s racist to prefer white meat. No, Rosenbaum isn’t speaking figuratively; he actually detects a racial subtext to one’s preference in cuts of turkey:

White meat turkey has no taste. Its slabs of dry, fibrous material are more like cardboard conveyances, useful only for transporting flavorsome food like stuffing and gravy from plate to mouth. . . .

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? . . .
Do [people] 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.” . . .
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.

On the avian gustatory question, we’re with Rosenbaum. Not only do we vastly prefer dark meat to white, we had duck for Thanksgiving. But he’s wrong about pork. All pork contains myoglobin, the substance that distinguishes white meat from dark. Try cooking a pork tenderloin medium rare, as we do, and you’ll see it’s quite mouth-wateringly pink.

But wait. One thing that white meats–chicken and turkey breasts and wings, and many types of fish–have in common is that they’re all lean meats. “Lean” is a synonym for “skinny,” which, as we know from reading Slate, is a code word for “black.”

That suggests that Obama’s choice of “white turkey chili” was not a joke at Romney’s expense but an expression of his own identity–and that Ron Rosenbaum is the real racist.

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Alas it is a mere mention but it is a mention nonetheless.