White meat or light meat refers to the lighter-colored meat of poultry as contrasted with dark meat. In a more general sense, white meat may also refer to any lighter-colored meat, as contrasted with red meats like beef and some types of game.
Pork
Given nutritional concerns, meat producers are eager to have their products considered as “white”, and the United States National Pork Board has positioned their product as “Pork. The Other White Meat”, alongside poultry and fish; however, meats which are red when raw and turn white on cooking, like pork, are sometimes categorized by the United States Department of Agriculture as red meats. This categorization is controversial as some types of fish, such as tuna, are red when raw and turn white when cooked; similarly, certain types of poultry that are sometimes grouped as “white meat” are actually “red” when raw, such as duck and goose. The debate is mainly one of semantics as nutritionists consider all meat from mammals to be “red meat” while this is not the case in other fields such as husbandry, biology, genetics, physiology, etc.
In Israel, where Jewish dietary laws are popularly practiced, forbidding the consumption of pork, the usage of the word “hazir” (“pig” and also “pork”) is taboo, “white meat” is the accepted way to refer to pork.