Lecture 1: Why does a chicken has white meat?

When I was young, I wondered a lot about food. Today I will answer the question, why are some meat red andsome white? We know, for instance, that chicken is white but pork meat is more like pink while like the meat of a cow is red. Let's have chicken and beef as our main focus. If we look just at the differences, a cow is bigger, animal and a slower animal compared the to chicken.



A chicken has fast twitched muscles. Those muscles are quicker and more alert for danger. If you compare it to a cow, reacts slower. It is a big animal, so it is harder to hunt a cow by foxes than a chicken. Fast-twitched animals have more myoglobin than slow- twitched animals. There are even animals with no myoglobin, like some fish.

Myoglobin is a protein, with a heme group. We also know another protein that contains a heme group. We know the protein, hemoglobin. Hemoglobin can bind with oxygen to transfer the oxygen. While hemoglobin has 4 heme groups, myoglobin has only one.


The amount of Myoglobin will say if the animal is fast-twitched or slow-twitched. Pork contains myoglobin but compared to beef, pork has less myoglobin. In this picture, you see an indication of the amount of myoglobin and the color. In the next lecture, I will talk about the effect of curing meat on the heme group of myoglobin.

Random food fact
Almonds are a member of the peach family

Alliumphobia is the fear of garlic.

The M’s in M & M’s stand for ‘Mars & Murrie’, the co-creators of the candy.