Other forms: meats
Meat is food that comes from the body of an animal. Red meat, cook the meat, meat and two veg.
Red and white meat is the common division, and processed meat is a separate category in health advice. The meat of something means the substantial part: the meat of the argument. Note one man's meat is another man's poison; and that meat once meant food of any kind, which is why sweetmeat means a sweet, mincemeat contains no meat, and meat and drink means everything you need.
1nounmeatFood that comes from the body of an animal.
“I don't eat meat, but I do eat fish now and then.”
2nounsubstantialThe substantial part of something.
“The first chapter is slow, but the meat of the book is in the middle.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
meat is a food.
Old English mete meant food of any kind, and the Scandinavian cognates still do — Danish mad and Swedish mat mean food. The narrowing to flesh happened in English alone, leaving sweetmeat and mincemeat behind as fossils.
Middle English
mete — food
English, today
meat
From Middle English mete (“food”). Cognates Cognate with frr Miit (“meat”), Danish mad (“food”), Faroese and Icelandic matur (“food, meal”), nrn mader (“food”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish mat (“food”), Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐍄𐍃 (“food”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA