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It all started with dinner.
Nothing fancy.
Just a quiet Tuesday evening after work.
My husband, Mark, stood at the kitchen counter seasoning a thick pork loin while I chopped vegetables for a salad.
Out of nowhere, he asked, “Can you hand me the seasoning for the white meat?”
I looked up.
“The what?”
“The pork.”
I laughed.
“You mean the red meat.”
He frowned.
“No, pork is white meat.”
I shook my head.
“Chicken is white meat.”
“Turkey is white meat.”
“Pork is definitely red meat.”
Mark stopped seasoning and stared at me.
“No way.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m completely serious.”
Within seconds, what started as a harmless conversation turned into a full-blown debate.
Neither of us wanted to admit the other might be right.
“I’ve always heard pork referred to as ‘the other white meat,'” Mark insisted.
“That was just an advertising slogan,” I replied.
“No, it’s because it’s actually white meat.”
“It looks pink before you cook it!”
“So?”
“So red meat is pink or red.”
He crossed his arms.
“It turns white when you cook it.”
“So does fish.”
“Fish isn’t white meat.”
“Exactly!”
Neither of us was making much progress.
Our teenage daughter wandered into the kitchen just in time to hear us.
“What are you two arguing about now?”
“Pork,” we answered together.
She blinked.
“You’ve been married twenty-three years…”
“…and this is tonight’s crisis?”
We laughed, but neither of us backed down.
Dinner continued with each of us trying to prove our point.
Mark searched old memories.
“My grandmother always called pork white meat.”
“My dad always called it red meat,” I replied.
By the time we sat down to eat, everyone at the table had picked a side.
Our son sided with Mark.
Our daughter sided with me.
Even Grandma, who happened to be visiting, joined the discussion.
“In my day,” she smiled, “we just called it supper.”
That settled nothing.
The next morning, I decided to do a little research.
What I discovered surprised me.
From a nutritional and scientific perspective, pork is classified as red meat.
The reason has nothing to do with how it looks after cooking.
Instead, scientists classify meat based on the amount of myoglobin, a protein that stores oxygen in muscle tissue.
Animals with higher levels of myoglobin—including pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats—are considered sources of red meat.
That’s why pork belongs in the red meat category alongside beef and lamb.
But then another question came up.
Why have so many people heard that pork is white meat?
The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple.
Decades ago, a famous advertising campaign promoted pork as “The Other White Meat.”