Dear Ms. Yamaguchi, about your whale curry...
A Japanese company said Tuesday it would start offering whale curry in its takeaway business lunches, as the country pursues its controversial whale hunt in the Antarctic.Asian Lunch, which says it sells 1,000-1,500 lunch boxes daily in Tokyo's business districts, will offer the meat once a week, starting Thursday with a South Asian-style keema curry.
[...]
As for protests against Japan's whaling, [Asian Lunch spokeswoman] Yamaguchi said the company just "does not want to waste meat once their lives were deprived of for research."
"We would feel uncomfortable if we hunted whales by ourselves for the purpose of eating them," she said.
Dear Ms. Yamaguchi,
You should feel uncomfortable selling whale curry. The whales that you are eating were "deprived of their lives" not for the purpose of research: there are non-lethal means of learning virtually everything which research with a harpoon can tell us. And while it would make you uncomfortable if the whales were killed for the purposes of eating them, this isn't the case either: 4,000 tonnes of whale meat sit unsold in cold storage while the Japanese Fisheries Agency attempts to launch desperate programmes to get rid of it through school lunchs and other subsidized programmes.
The reason you should feel uncomfortable, Mr. Yamaguchi, is that the whales that were killed to make your curry were killed to line the pockets of a very few bureaucrats who spend 945,550,000 yen per year, about US$ 8.6 million, subsidizing a whaling programme that generates no useful science and a lot of unsellable whalemeat.
Rather than feel uncomfortable, you should cancel your contract and demand an explanation of the Japanese Fisheries Agency and the parliamentarians who approve these scandalous subsidies every year.
There is no honour in eating a lunch made possible by a criminal waste of taxpayer's money.
Comments
Hi there!
A friend and I were discussing the latest Greenpeace campaign to stop Japanese whaling fleets and wondered if some thought had been given to developing a campaign that equates Japanese products (those imported into New Zealand, America, England, etc.) with the slaughtering of whales? I see Greenpeace has a campaign asking how many years it takes to change a lightbulb, well perhaps one could also ask how many whales died for my refrigerator, my VCR, etc.? Brand damage would surely sharpen Japan's attention to our point?
Posted by: virg | November 28, 2007 10:44 PM
I've eaten whale.
It's very chewy and doesn't even taste good.
Posted by: Eric Nuyens | January 1, 2008 6:05 PM