Meat of an Egg

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Carl, and I’m calling from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Hi, Carl. Welcome to the show.

I was hoping you could tell me a bit about a particular use of the term meat. I was wondering if it’s common or if there’s any history to using this term, this word, to refer to food that isn’t animal flesh and would never be mistaken for it.

This is meat, M-E-A-T, meat?

That’s it, yes, exactly.

Like chicken or beef or that sort of thing. Basically, what happened was I was on the internet and I came across this discussion thread where people were talking about little tricks they use to make their lives easier. They call them life hacks. And I said that if you’re boiling an egg, you can put some baking soda in the water, which stops the shell from sticking to the meat. And this other person, I don’t know if they looked at me like I had two heads because it’s the internet, but they did seem very surprised. They seemed very surprised to see someone use the term meat in reference to an egg. So I was just wondering if that’s an unusual way to put it.

My heavens. So you were talking about separating the shell from the inner part, the edible part of the egg, and you referred to that edible part of the egg as meat.

Exactly, yes. They were surprised. I think they got what I meant. It was just they were surprised. And, you know, I wouldn’t just talk about an egg like this. It’s pretty much anything where you need to separate like an inedible outer shell from something edible, like an egg or an orange or like a nut, maybe.

Sure, sure. Gosh, I wonder if the people who had a problem with that have access to dictionaries. If you look at Merriam-Webster, in the first definition, it defines meat as something eaten by man or beast for nourishment food. But then the second part of that definition is the edible part of a nut, fruit, or egg.

Oh, really?

Yes, yes. And you’ll find that a similar definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. I mean, meat, the word itself has a really interesting history because it generally referred to food or nourishment in Middle English. What’s really cool is that it became more and more specific over time to refer usually to animal flesh. But in Middle English, you could call vegetables green meat and dairy products white meat. That’s how generic that term was. And I guess generally, I mean, in general usage, when you’re talking about, you know, I’m going to fry up some eggs, you don’t say I’m going to fry up some egg meat or, you know, would you like some poached egg meat? But you were perfectly correct to describe the inner part of the egg as meat.

Oh, okay. Do you know if people use the term this way in languages other than English? Because I was talking to my brother about this. He lives in Japan, and he said that in Japanese, the symbol for meat is found all the time on packages of fruit and stuff like that. Plums, I think, was the example he used.

Interesting. I don’t know of any others. Do you, Grant?

It’s possible. It’s hard when you have the cross-translation if their symbol for meat means exactly the same as our word for meat.

Right, yeah. It’s hard to know without being fully conversant in both languages.

Right, yeah. I imagine so. I’ll maybe get him to send you a field report.

That would be great. And you can tell your correspondence that you were perfectly within your rights to use that word.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, that’s encouraging. Thank you.

Thank you, Carl.

My pleasure. Take care now. Thanks for calling. Bye.

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