Word: sushi
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While the team behind The Cove, the hidden-camera documentary about dolphin slaughter in Japan, was in Los Angeles last week accepting an Oscar for Best Documentary, it took a detour to help carry out another undercover sting operation - this time at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant...
...June 2005 I attended an annual whale-tasting event held by the Japanese Whaling Association at the national legislature in Tokyo. Restaurants from around Japan served their best cetacean recipes - whale sushi, whale sashimi, whale on crackers, canned whale, whale with Osaka noodles - to black-suited Japanese legislators, who grazed from one table to the next...
...When you cover a whale-tasting event, you have to taste whale. And morality aside, I can tell you that whale meat isn't good. As sushi and sashimi, it was fatty and chewy with a bland, blubbery taste - like salmon that's been kept out too long. The one exception was the whale noodle dish, but I'm going to say its success had more to do with the noodles and spicy broth than it did with the whale. All in all, the experience made it hard for me to keep a straight face when people referred to whale...
...neither is Japan. In part, the Japanese may be protecting their right to whale as a stand-in for a separate issue they actually care about: fishing for bluefin tuna, which is popular in sushi. The Japanese eat an estimated 80% of the world's catch of the species, which many scientists believe is in danger of being fished out of existence. If Japan holds the line on whaling, the argument goes, it would send a signal that limits on bluefin tuna aren't up for debate either...
...limitations in December. If the tuna is finally listed, it would represent a watershed moment in endangered-species protection. It's one thing to halt the hunting of relatively rare species like the rhino or the elephant. It's another to ban the trade of a major staple of sushi restaurants - especially as a cuisine that was once limited to Japanese workers has become a global favorite. A ban on the bluefin tuna trade would likely raise consumer prices of the fish in the short term, but it may be the only thing that could prevent the tuna population from...