White Meat Explanation

Many have heard, and will generally classify meats, in one of two categories: red meat, or white meat.  Often people believe the coloration of the meat is based on the presence of blood.  This is actually false but is one reason that many will reject the idea of eating "red" meat because it has blood.  Fish and poultry do in fact have blood and it is how the oxygen is carried through to their vital organs.

What makes red meat red is the increased presence of Myoglobin (not to be confused with hemoglobin which is in blood) in red meat.  Blood will absolutely be present in raw meat (including white meat), but the red color is not primarily because of the blood but because of the Myoglobin.  White meat is white because it lacks the elevated Myoglobin levels present in red meat, but this should not be confused with lack of blood.  Fish, generally, don't appear to have blood in the filets (especially at super markets) because the filets are thinner, they've been rinsed, and fish contain less blood then adult mammals, which makes it easier to "clean."  Anyone who has filleted a fish knows that fish contain red blood.

The basic idea behind this ideology is that it is fine to classify the meats this way, but to believe that red meat isn't clean because it has blood in it would be neglecting the fact that white meat has blood as well.  Cooking both red and white meat thoroughly would eliminate this issue, but people just can't help but to think that red meat is red because of blood.