The ignorance of a BBC reporter

I have a feeling that the BBC reporter responsible for this article doesn't get out of Tokyo very much, and spends most of his time hanging around people who have too much disposable income. It's really a stretch to call whale meat a delicacy. You can find restaurants in Japan deifying any food. I've been to some where tofu is served for your choice of 12 to 21 courses, each one a different preparation. Once I went to a restaurant where the specialty was fu, dried wheat gluten. And don't get me started on the various kinds of dancing food, where the fish or shellfish you eat is alive until it hits your stomach acid.

The truth is, most Japanese sometimes consider any fatty meat a delicacy, partly because fatty meat didn't used to be in the Japanese diet at all. Consider toro, and especially o-toro, the fatty meat from the belly of the blue fin tuna. That used to be pet food. I'm not kidding. Whale meat, like some kinds of specially raised steers, is particularly fatty meat. It must go down well with excessive quantities of beer, as in, "Drink another couple of beers, then I dare you to eat this!" Have I mentioned pickled sea cucumber intestines before? That's considered a delicacy by some people.

Getting back to the whale meat, as I showed you a few weeks ago, judging by my almost daily trips to local stores, it's rarely consumed in this area, and what is sold in the supermarkets is very cheap meat. But I guess the right cut, from the right kind of whale, served in a restaurant where the beer flows freely . . .