Meat: baseline

Before I begin, I'd like to thank the recommendations section of my news and video feeds for an entertaining movie, the kind that goes well with my favorite movie food and makes me really glad I'm not that into bling.

I have a tendency to compare meats to chicken. For example, rabbit tastes a bit milder than chicken, or duck tastes more gamy and greasy than chicken. But why is chicken my basis for comparison - for that matter, why should it be anyone's?

During a recent tutoring session, I learned that my tutor uses pork as a baseline. Not that there's a shortage of dishes based on other meats, but when speaking about meat, the immediate thought is of pork, and one has to specify whether the meat being spoken of is from another animal. Why is that? Is there a cultural equivalent to the slogan "a chicken in every pot" that focuses on pork, or is it because the birds are more valuable for egg-laying and feathers than they are for outright eating? I don't know the answer there yet. I'm still working on repetitive and rudimentary sentences, which at least makes things easier to correct when one missing character turns a cook into a cannibal.

Time for a roast chicken. Ingrid Bergman's on.