Following on from the previous Difference Between East And West post, the BBC News has an article about whale meat – cruelty and the kitchen and states “Whale meat was not everywhere…but in every city I visited I came across at least one restaurant which served it in some form.”
I must admit, I didn’t see anywhere offering whale meat when I was in Tokyo, but I wasn’t particularly looking. One of the journalists the author of the article talked to was an Austrlian where they slaughter around two million kangaroos every year: and the Austrialian journalist didn’t see anything wrong with that, but the slaughter of whales were a “barbaric cruelty”. The Japanese wouldn’t think about eating Dog – but Vietnamese people would think its ok, and in Peru they actually drink liquidated live frogs…
It’s amazing on the cultural differences that there exists just between the different style of foods. I’m actually against whale hunting myself – mainly because of the endangered level of some of them and the fact that it’s difficult to make a “clean kill” (it takes around 3 explosive bolts to kill a whale).