Dark Meat, EXPLOOOOORED

Now, when we haul off, as I recently did, and recommend people start eating on the darker side of poultry, we mustn't get all rose-colored-glasses about it, as I recently did, and imply that a person can just switch hit just like that, no problems, no setbacks, no period of adjustment.

Because dark meat represents a hurdle for whitemeat devotees.

I've seen a lot of terminology bandied about lately:
-not so fresh
-greasy
-brown

The implication being that white meat is:
-fresh
-not greasy
-white

Let's take these one at a time, and let's take our time, the better to open our eyes to a new kind of way.

First, fresh.

If white meat is fresh and dark meat is not so fresh, the implication is that the legs of the capon, the goose, or the ostrich, died before the breast of the capon, the goose, or the ostrich. Wait, we need to decide on a species. A partridge. We are fixing to eat a partridge. Let's make it Danny Partridge--he's a good gateway free-range bird, since he's the Partridge most similar, phenotypically, anyway, to the Butterballs we're used to.

Okay, so picture this: it's Thanksgiving Eve in Alaska, and Sarah Palin has once again been required by the media to render up a fat load of soundbites. People are bored by her wackedout eyeglass frames by now, so she'll need a dynamic background for her mammerings. That, of course, means her unpaid illegal immigrant farm hand must hoist Danny Partridge up by his Keds, upend him in the giant metal funnel poultry-dispatcher and relieve him of his onerous life.

Consider that done. Now imagine we are looking at the brined, trussed body of Danny Partridge, ready for roasti-

-you know what, this is depressing; I have nothing against that poor little redheaded kid. He had a hard life. Plus the joke is getting old. I'm changing species again.

So Sarah Palin's had one of her howevermany children roast the bald eagle she got from the dude Bush just pardoned last week for shooting all those bald eagles, and the whole Palin clan is sitting down with forks and knives in hand, all ready to eat a really patriotic meal when suddenly the pregnant one's boyfriend pipes up:

"No dark meat for me, thanks, it's never seemed quite fresh somehow."

But all the meat on the bird died when the bird died. So all the meat is exactly the same age as all the rest of the meat. It is all of the exact same freshness!

Plus I'm pretty sure a bald eagle is entirely dark meat. Dark meat is simply muscle that gets used, as opposed to white meat, which is muscle that lies flabbily and unnecessarily and uselessly against the bone merely because it has been bred to be there. Eagles, being wild and free Americans, have not been bred to have useless meat on them. They use their breast muscles to do all kinds of wild free American stuff like fly in whenever they see a knot of buzzards on the side of the road so they can kick ass and get way more than their share of decayed armadillo.

Bristol's boyfriend sure is lucky he signed on with the Palin babymill. He must have spent his whole youth palling around with old washed up terrorists if he thinks it's okay to say the meat of the symbol of our nation is "not so fresh."