Don’t be Afraid of the Dark (meat)

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.


jay-wennington-280321-unsplash.jpg

Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash

About Author

yvonne.liu.wolf

Yvonne Wolf was born in Taiwan and educated in the U.S. and Europe. She has extensive experience living and working internationally (Denmark and Japan). She is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Danish, and has studied Japanese, Spanish, and Greek. Between work and personal travel, she has visited more than 20 countries and well-traveled within the U.S. and Canada. She has worked with organizations and business executives focusing on communication strategies working with Chinese and East Asian partners. Among her many skills is mediating across cultural misunderstandings.