Back in 2007 two humpback whales became befuddled by the backwash of mobile phones in San Francisco Bay and swam seventy miles up the Sacramento River. Oceanologists failed to seduce the errant sea mammals to the open sea with love sirens from other whales and Japanese researchers offered to lend California marine biologists a sonar signature of their whaling ships in hopes that the whales will flee the estuary in terror. The Bush administration responded with an entreaty from a Sapporo fish market, which would purchase the pair for scientific culinary purposes should the whales die.
“Maybe this gesture will ease the entrance of US beef into the Japanese market,” one FDA official mused at a Georgetown sushi restaurant.
Whale meat?
Yes, whale meant.
Back in the 1960s a Haymarket fish market served whale sandwiches to Bostonians. My friend and I tried one. It tasted nothing like beef or chicken or salmon. It was much better, although my great-grandaunt Bert who sailed around the world in the 1870s said that that the cheaper slabs were very blubbery and full of fat.
Despite its deliciousity I never ate it again for moral reason.
I guess it was too much like eating a fat person, but it’s a good thing whale meat has no aphrodisiacal properties or else the Chinese would have sucked the bone marrow out of the last whale decades ago.
Lip-smacking good.
ps thankfully those whales made it to the sea after feasting on the fish in the estuary.
