Japan loves its unusual ice cream flavors. It’s home to exotic yet allegedly tasty varieties such as octopus, raw horsemeat, garlic, shark fin, and cow tongue. It’s the stuff of Internet listicle legend. It should be no surprise, then, that, given the nation’s refusal to drop its barbaric whale hunting practices, there would be an ice cream vendor in the Kanto region, in a farmer’s market called Hanamaru Ichiba in the town of Minami-Boso, that sells an ice cream variation they call Umami Kujira Soft — soft serve ice cream topped with raw whale meat.
According to the Japanese newspaper Asahi, the farmer’s market is nestled within a roadside rest facility within the Wadacho district of Minami-Boso, home to the Kanto region’s only whaling station.
Folks in Japan rarely eat whales anymore, though it used to be a much larger staple of Japanese diets. Now, whale makes up only around 0.1 percent of the meat the Japanese consume. It’s not like people are eating fat, cartoonishly large whale stakes that dangle from dinner plates by several feet on all sides. Instead, it’s mostly treated as a novelty or specialty food item, a category the whale meat ice cream falls under.
The raw whale meat is dark red and is sprinkled with pepper. The translation of the original article seems a little spotty, but it seems to imply that in addition to the pepper, there’s also some soy sauce involved that “cannot mask the distinctive smell of the dark red flesh.” Mmm. I love my ice cream to have a distinctive smell that cannot be masked, no matter how hard I try, little green pine tree air fresheners be damned.
The whole hunk is arranged on top of soft serve ice cream, the entire confection is then served up in a cone and topped with a glutinous rice wafer shaped like a whale—a move that seems specifically designed to taunt the whale community.
The whale ice cream cells for ¥680, which roughly equates to $4.50 US. The novelty snack has become something of a hit for the farmer’s market, with some folks Asahi spoke to saying the pairing of ice cream and raw whale meat is “less ill-matched” than you’d think. Not necessarily a ringing endorsement. It sounds like the rest of that thought is “but it’s still disgusting.”
The post Yum! Get Ice Cream Topped With Raw Whale Meat at This Japanese Market appeared first on VICE.
The post Yum! Get Ice Cream Topped With Raw Whale Meat at This Japanese Market appeared first on VICE.
