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Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
by Dana Goodyear
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But subsistence coastal whaling has little in common with the hunt today, which takes
place in the Southern Ocean, in an area designated a whale sanctuary by the International
Whaling Commission in 1994. The Japanese government spends copiously to support the hunt—reportedly some forty-five million in 2011, including funds intended for tsunami relief — though it struggles to find a market for the meat, which, under the terms of their
research exemption, they are obligated not to waste. In 2008, the government sold ten tons
of whale at a discount to schools in Yokohama for 'Traditional School Lunch Week." Homey,
old-fashioned, and not particularly prestigious, whale nonetheless commands a high price
at specialty all-whale restaurants where everything from tongues to testicles are served.
The tastier tail and belly cuts of the rarer baleen whales are sometimes available at
fancy sushi bars. But a poll conducted by the International Fund for Animal Welfare in
early 2013 showed that only ten per cent of Japanese had eaten whale in the previous year.
"The whale industry has nothing to do with whales," Casson Trenor, a former Sea
Shepherd activist who in 2008 started what he believes to have been the world's first
sustainable sushi bar, Tataki, in San Francisco. (Now you can eat sustainable sushi in
Boise.) "It has to do with drawing a line in the sand about national sovereignty and
resource management," he said. "The idea of other countries being able to determine what
can and can't be taken from the ocean is anathema to the Japanese." To this way of
thinking, Japan has created a baffle to distract Western conservation groups from the
fishery it truly wants to shield from interference: bluefin.
When they got to the restaurant, Crystal chose a seat facing away from the bar, and put
the purse with the camera in it on the table. On the chair next to her, she put her
friend's purse, which had a gallon-size Ziploc bag inside it. They ordered omakase,
chef's choice. After they had been eating for a few hours, her friend asked the waitress,
in Japanese, for whale: kujira. According to Crystal, it came to the table, sliced
very thin, on a glass plate, with special soy sauce, and accompanied by several pieces of
dark reddish-brown sashimi that the waitress identified as horse, which has been illegal
to serve to people in California since 1998. Crystal's friend, who was seated facing the bar, had her leg
pressed against Crystal's; she moved it away whenever the chefs were watching. The women
tasted both kinds of sashimi, while the chefs studied their reactions intently. As soon as
the chefs turned away, Crystal's friend touched her leg again, and Crystal secreted two
pieces of each kind of meat in a napkin, which she slipped into the Ziploc. They left with
a hand-written receipt, which included the words "whale" and "horse," in English. The
price for that plate alone was $85. Though the "horse" was gross, Crystal said.
"Everything else was so good. I feel guilty saying it."
Hambleton took the meat, froze it, and the following morning FedEx'ed it to Dr. Scott
Baker, the associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University,
and an expert in cetacean molecular genetics. Baker, who recently established a database
of whale, dolphin, and porpoise DNA, and has sampled cetacean meat sold in markets all
over Asia, identified the meat as sei, the fourth largest of the baleen whales, behind
blues, fins, and rights. Fast, sleek, and elusive—they live far offshore and can go
thirty-five miles an hour—sei have been listed as endangered since 1973. Baker called the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, which enforces the Marine Mammal Protection
Act.
A few months later, federal investigators asked Crystal to return to The Hump to
collect more samples. Her Chinese friend had refused to go back, afraid that the yakuza
were involved and might come after her, so Crystal brought another friend, Heather, a
petite, half-Asian woman in her early twenties. Hambleton tricked out the Guess purse with
a better camera, from a top designer of surveillance equipment in New York, who helped
with "The Cove" and, Hambleton told me, works with Israeli intelligence. "A lot of the
cameras we get before the military does," he said.
Excerpted from Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear. Copyright © 2013 by Dana Goodyear. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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