If you order a chicken salad, chances are the chicken meat on the salad is breast meat. Chicken breast costs more per pound and is a highly preferred part of chicken consumption in the American context. If your favorite Chinese dish is Gongbao Chicken, authentically made it would be chicken dark meat cut in cubes. In fact, the preferred chicken meat is dark meat in the Chinese context. A slab of chicken breast is considered dry, tough, and undesirable and rarely served in a patty form as in a grilled chicken breast burger. There’s an expression in English that refers to a tough, undesirable slab of meat. That is the idiom of giving someone the cold shoulder. Linguistic history tells us that the expression referred to the toughest part of mutton and a poor way to show hospitality, not the rejection by a human shoulder that snubs a warm welcome. Think about that next time you hear that English expression.
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