Why Did We “Save the Whales”?
It’s more complicated than you think
“Whale Carpaccio — 130 Kroner.”
Thus read an appetizer on a menu at a restaurant in Bergen, Norway, when I dined there a few years back. I wanted to sample this odd dish. What would the experience be like? Would the meat be chewy like pork, or flaky like fish?
These were my thoughts when the waitress approached and asked (maybe a little sadistically?) if I’d like to “try the whale.” But before I could signal my assent, somewhere in the back of my mind a fuzzy ’70s-era television memory arose — the image of a Greenpeace Zodiac bobbing on the high seas defensively poised between a breaching whale and a Soviet harpoon cannon. “No,” I said, “I’ll have the mussels.”
I reprise this anecdote here not to show how evolved I am, but rather to juxtapose my hazy whale-belief structure with the much more nuanced understanding of a man who has immersed himself in the subtleties, trickeries, scandals and science of cetaceans. D. Graham Burnett, the author of “The Sounding of the Whale,” a sweeping, important study of cetacean science and policy, has quite literally “tried the whale” and could probably describe for you whale meat’s precise consistency. But he has also been tried by the whale in the deepest sense, because he spent a decade poring over thousands upon…
