Here's something you can't do.

So I was at a staff drinking party on Wednesday. Staff drinking parties are something Japanese people do. It's where everyone can get together with all the people they see every single day, except it's more fun because we're drunk and we can wear blue jeans. Anyway, in between being interrogated in crappy English and answering in even crappier Japanese, I got a chance to sample one of the delicious local delicacies.

The first thing you notice about whale meat is the color. It's black as coal. But only on the outside. The inside is red as spilled blood. The combined effect is like eating a chewy piece of volcano, all igneous rock on the outside, with hot magma lurking beneath the surface. I'm actually very confused about how that works, because these are small, bit sized pieces of whale, and a whale is a large animal. This seems to suggest that at some point the outside of each of these small pieces was, in fact, the inside of a larger piece which means everything ought to be the same color. Maybe it oxidizes and changes color or something. I don't have a lot of experience with whale outside of Moby Dick, and that's mostly talking about spermecetti.

The second thing you'll notice about the flesh of the great cetaceans is the texture. It's chewy. Not like the fatty part on the edge of a steak chewy. Like bubblegum chewy. This may be because it is raw. Did I forget to mention that? The total experience for the end-user is a lot like eating meat taffy. It doesn't taste like chicken, and it doesn't taste like fish. You dip it in some mystery sauce (all Japanese sauces are a mystery to me) and then you spend about twenty minutes eating it. Really, it's a mandibular workout.

But back to my original point, good luck buying a pound of leviathan meat at a Safeway.