Potty-mouthed, belligerent, shouty, irascible, narcissistic ‘celebrity chef’ (and that’s just a small selection of the descriptions used in online newspaper articles) Gordon Ramsay has been helping out Norway’s whalers by proving that while he is a bit narked about people eating shark fins he doesn’t mind them tucking into a bit of Minke Whale. Never mind that Minkes – one of a group of animals that are quite likely to be as intelligent (and certainly less bad-tempered) than the Hell’s Kitchen ‘star’ himself – are killed by having a harpoon tipped with the equivalent of a hand grenade fired into their bodies as they mosey along minding their own business, it’s okay because (to quote a spokesperson speaking for the normally highly vocal ‘star’) “…these whales are not endangered like the sharks are”.
Oh, well, that’s okay then. As long as it’s not rare – regardless of its right to exist, that it’s a highly evolved animal, or that killing them is totally unnecessary anyway – Gordon will eat it or cook it (or get one of the chefs who staff his restaurants to cook it anyway). That presumably explains why this legendary campaigner against the cruelty of shark-finning still serves foie gras, a ‘food’ created by forcing plain-Jane, unspectacular, common-or-garden geese to eat until their livers almost explode, in his Restaurant Gordon Ramsay (menu online as of today).
What an arrogant w**ker (in the opinion of this article anyway). And a bit hypocritical too, eh…
We went to Iceland in 2009, they had Minke on the menu as ‘fish’. I guess that the mislabelling it helps to desensitize people to both the fact that they are a highly intelligent, communal mammal, and that by suggesting they are fish they create an image of ‘fishing’ rather than the harpoon and grenade.
On the positive side, in Iceland there are a lot of people pushing the whale watching industry and we saw a lot of ‘ban whaling’ type posters / stickers.