Whale sushi chefs sentenced to jail time

In 2010, a documentary crew led by the associate producer of "The Cove" dined at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant called the Hump. They pretended to be a group of raucous high rollers, ordering increasingly more expensive and bizarre sushi items, racking up a bill that came to over $600.

Near the end of their spree, the crew requested whale sushi. Not only did the chef serve them whale sushi without batting an eye, they even marked it clearly as such on the bill. The crew pocketed the meat and had it sent to a lab for testing. The lab results confirmed that it was the meat of a Sei whale, which is an endangered species that is covered under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

A federal grand jury has indicted both the parent company of the restaurant and the two chefs who collaborated to smuggle in and serve the whale meat, Kiyoshiro Yamamoto and Susumu Ueda. The chefs had ordered the whale meat from a Japanese man who has previously pled guilty to charges of selling illegal marine mammal meat. The smuggler marked the meat as "fatty tuna" on the shipping invoice, and delivered it to The Hump.

Whale meat is considered a junk food in Japan, a cheap meat substitute to be fed to school kids and elderly pensioners on a fixed income. But in the world of sushi, particularly in America where it is banned, it is considered an illicit delicacy. Because of the whale's intense oxygen requirements, their meat is dense with blood vessels and appears almost black from the vascularization, like a particularly tender steak.

There are few things that can truly be considered "wrong" in the food world. But deliberately and knowingly smuggling in the meat of an endangered species in order to serve it to your customers certainly ranks high on that list.

Image courtesy of Flickr/UNDP in Europe and Central Asia