It’s bizarre to think about. A human being eats the very creature that fuels his lamp.
Like Stubb, dining on whale meat lit by the whale’s own oil.
It’s such an odd, out-of-the-ordinary custom that it’s worth digging into its history and the logic behind it.
Records show that three hundred years ago, right whale tongue was an expensive delicacy in France.
People paid top price to eat it back then.
During the reign of Henry the Eighth, a royal cook earned a generous reward for inventing a perfect sauce to pair with barbecued porpoise.
And porpoises, of course, are a type of whale.
Even today, porpoise meat is still considered fine dining in some places.
Cooks shape the meat into balls the size of billiard balls, season them heavily with spices, and they end up tasting just like turtle or veal meatballs.
The old monks of Dunfermline were huge fans of this dish. They even had an official royal grant that gave them steady access to porpoises.
Truth be told, most whalers would consider whale meat a premium meal—if the whales weren’t so enormous.
Sitting down to a meat pie nearly a hundred feet long is enough to kill anyone’s appetite.
These days, only unbiased, unfussy men like Stubb will eat cooked whale meat willingly.
The Inuit people, though, have never been picky about it.
Everyone knows they survive on whale meat, and they even age refined batches of whale oil like fine vintage wine.
One of their most respected healers, Zogranda, recommended feeding thin strips of whale blubber to infants.
He swore it was incredibly juicy and full of nutrients for growing babies.
This makes me think of a group of English sailors from long ago.
They were accidentally abandoned in Greenland by their whaling ship.
For months, they survived entirely on leftover whale scraps—rotted bits left on the shore after crews boiled down whale blubber for oil.
Dutch whalers call these leftover scraps “fritters”.
The name fits perfectly. They’re brown, crispy, and when fresh, they smell just like the homemade donuts old Amsterdam housewives used to bake.
They look so edible that even the most disciplined, self-restrained traveler would struggle not to take a bite.
The biggest reason civilized people turn up their noses at whale meat is how unbelievably rich and fatty it is.
Whales are the prize oxen of the ocean—so fat that their meat is too heavy and greasy to feel like elegant, refined food.
Take the whale’s hump, for example.
It would taste just as good as buffalo hump—a rare, coveted delicacy—if it weren’t just a solid, massive block of pure fat.
Spermaceti, the precious oil from sperm whales, is just as mild and creamy.
It resembles the soft, semi-jelly white flesh of a three-month-old coconut, but it’s far too rich to ever replace butter.
Still, whalers have figured out ways to eat it by mixing it with other foods to cut the richness.
During long, overnight watch shifts, sailors regularly dip hard ship’s biscuits into giant vats of hot whale oil to fry them up.
I’ve eaten many a satisfying supper made exactly this way.
Small sperm whale brains are also seen as a luxury dish among whalers.
Crews chop open the whale’s skull with an axe and pull out two plump, pale white brain lobes that look exactly like two big puddings.
They mix the brains with flour and cook them into a rich, delicious mash.
The flavor is similar to calf’s head, a dish loved by fancy eaters.
It’s a running joke that wealthy food lovers who constantly eat calf brains eventually gain enough sense to tell the difference between a calf’s head and their own.
That might not sound impressive, but it actually takes sharp judgment.
This is why seeing a fancy young man eating a plate of cooked calf’s head is such a sad, ironic sight.
The head almost seems to stare back at him in accusation, as if whispering the ancient line: “Even you, Brutus?”
Land dwellers don’t hate the idea of eating whale just because the meat is overly fatty and greasy.
A big part of their disgust comes from that strange, unsettling detail I mentioned earlier.
A person kills a wild sea creature, then eats it under light made from that creature’s own body.
But we’re all guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, if we’re honest.
The first human to ever kill and eat an ox was surely seen as a brutal murderer in his time.
He probably would have been executed for it.
If oxen had been the ones judging his trial, he definitely would have been found guilty—and he would have deserved it, by the standards of any murder.
Walk into any city meat market on a Saturday night.
Look at the crowds of living humans staring up at rows and rows of dead livestock.
Who’s the real cannibal here?
I’ll tell you the truth. A Fijian native who salts down lean missionary meat in his cellar to survive a famine will face kinder judgment on doomsday than the so-called civilized, sophisticated food lovers of our world.
You people nail geese alive to the ground to fatten their livers, then feast on expensive foie gras without a second thought.
Everyone loves to judge Stubb for eating whale by the light of the whale’s own oil, calling it a cruel insult to the injured creature.
But look at your own fancy roast beef dinner.
What’s your knife handle made of? Bone—from another ox, just like the one you’re eating.
After you finish eating that fattened goose, what do you use to pick your teeth? A feather from that same goose.
Not long ago, the secretary of an animal cruelty prevention society wrote all their official letters using a quill plucked from a live goose.
It’s only been a month or two since that society finally voted to use steel pens instead.