People often defend these kind of acts with the rationale that it is a culture heritage. If so, shouldn't they be sailing the ocean with traditional wooden sailboats and relying only on wind and currents to take them where they should go?
When we're talking about "cultural heritage", we mean respecting their choices regarding their cultural heritage (including abandoning parts of it). Not that they should absolutely stick to older practices on every aspect of life.
Historical legacy is absolutely no rationale for continuing to cause needless suffering in intelligent beings.
That is unachievable at the moment.
It's saddening, that people willingly participate in extinction of a species however... that is what whaling has become after all.
Full disclosure - Norwegian, living in an area where whaling has been performed for hundreds of years, currently have about 12-15 pounds of whale meat in the freezer.
If you don’t overcook it, it is extremely tender, but quickly -very quickly- turns rubber-y if it spends too long in the frying pan. You can eat it raw - with a spoon, almost.
Taste is slightly liver-y, and if the meat is old it can take on a cod liver oil-like taste which is rather unpleasant.
I mostly eat it like beef (meat room-tempered, nutmeg-browned butter in the frying pan, meat in pan thirty seconds either side to get a nice surface, then pull aside to rest for a few minutes prior to eating) or as a stew - onions, black pepper, whatever mushrooms I can find, whale meat diced, fry for a short while, add copious amounts of heavy cream, simmer until potatoes are done, yumyum.
There's a pretty valid point to be made that you don't NEED to eat whale meat. Or Cow meat. Or any meat really. There are economically available options in most areas that would allow for a nutritionally balanced, vegetarian (possibly vegan) diet.
This is specifically true about a developed nation like Japan.
There's counterpoints to be made (not all farm land is suitable for crop farming, so using it for husbandry is valuable; a complete one day flip without a slow phase out of meat would be economically devastating; freedom to eat animals is my right, etc) but you can't really say you NEED to do it. Science and nutrition doesn't back that up, and the economics are hazy at best.
With that sense of "need" you also don't need to be on HN, or on the internet. Heck, you don't need clothes if you live in a warm climate, and neither do you need 99% of your processions (and surely not in that quality).
"Need" is not much of an argument.
That cliché argument is used not only by the Japanese to defend whale hunting but to any kind of violence towards all non-human animals.
Things change. Things need to change.
No, it's more like:
"We do this for a long time, and we consider this part of who we are, and we like it, and want to keep doing it. We're not idiots to just do it because we did it in the past, and in fact, we have opted to drop tons of things that we did in the past that we don't like anymore, we're not stuck like that".
The reason the whaling industry still exists is because it receives government support for being a "protected tradition".
Still fishing is a general hard field.
They like it as meat, but they also like the parts of their culture associated with it.
The same way an American would like the turkey AND the thanksgiving dinner, and would like to continue having both, and not just because of turkey meat, but as a combo.
The fact that people have now changed their minds on that particular matter doesn't mean that anything people haven't changed their minds but consider tradition is equally wrong.
Or that there's some law-of-nature-style "right and wrong" aside what a culture deems as such. For all our modern posturing, if we were merely born 200 years ago in the US, heck, not even the South, we would statistically be far more likely to be in favor than against the practice (and still be considered perfectly "modern" for those times).
No, but it does mean that tradition can be an obstacle for considering the rightness of an action.
> Or that there's some law-of-nature-style "right and wrong" aside what a culture deems as such.
Agreed. But if we assume some basic principles (e.g. like preventable pain and suffering should be avoided or human existence is good or whatever), then we can question whether something is right according to those principles.
Have you yourself tried a non-flesh burger, and did you genuinely find it bad? Was it from a shop or a cafe or was it homemade? Or do you have a dogmatic belief that there has to be real suffering and murder for a burger to be real?
I hope artificial meat will be introduced as a 'luxury' product and replace mass-produced fast food ground beef after it is well established as a genuine alternative and not some inferior knock-off like artificial cheese.
I can understand why some people can be put off by the taste. Having previously eaten non-human animals, I can say that I prefer the taste of veggie burgers and sausages, although most vegan cheese tastes absolutely disgusting (especially the ones pretending to be parmesan). But I really, really wish that more of us would be willing to accept a reduction in the tastiness of certain dishes to help prevent antibiotics resistance, non-human animal suffering, climate breakdown, dead zones and starvation.
And other times I really can't tell the difference, and to be honest it kind of scares me. Some brands go so far as to make the minced "meat" look red and bloody[0]. Then, I have to take someone's word that this thing that really looks like a shrimp and is all crunchy really isn't a shrimp[1]. It's like a whole new art form.
[0]: https://www.naturli-foods.dk/produkter/aertefars/
[1]: http://vegetarian-plus.com/product/vegan-shrimp/ (Note: The ones I tried looked more convincing)
I would rather eat these textured soya protein burgers than even the best beef burger I've ever had. They are that good.
Also, upvoted because a difference of opinion isn't what down voting is for, surely ?
Yea, and on top of that Linda McCartney products are cheap, free from plastic packaging and pretty much available everywhere.
> Also, upvoted because a difference of opinion isn't what down voting is for, surely ?
I've also wondered about the semantics of the voting arrows (because I'm working on a HN-like[0]). In the guidelines[1] it says how voting/karma works, but not what a vote is supposed to mean. Within the (rarely used) polls[2] the meaning is a bit clearer. Lobsters[3] requires you to pick a reason for down-voting (and "I disagree" is not one of those), which makes its purpose a bit clearer.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/hjek/undebatable
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
[3]: https://lobste.rs
It stemmed from food shortages post-WWII.