It’s a bloody business, but it’s not immoral to kill whales for food

GIVEN any thought to what you’ll be eating for dinner tonight?

Perhaps you have already tucked in. Either way, chances are, some kind of meat was involved. But our view on what constitutes something worth tucking into is largely determined by our culture. It’s actually quite limited: beef, pork, chicken, lamb, fish, shellfish — and venison and a few other birds if you consider yourself upmarket.

Around the world, though, people kill a wide variety of creatures to eat their flesh. If it is edible, you can pretty much guarantee that somebody, somewhere, eats it. In most of the West we view only a select few species as “food”, although you don’t have to travel very far to find frog-eaters while a carnivorous Belgian friend who is very dear to me thinks nothing of tucking into a plate of horsemeat.