Having a taste for whale thus has roots in ancient history, but the politicization of whale-eating is a legacy of the oil-and-bone whaling industry. The New Englanders whose whale fisheries far outstripped other whale hunting for nearly two hundred years never developed a taste for whale meat, but at the same time they exerted an enormous influence on the world to come. Their whaling ventures helped connect the world's people into a global commercial network, and their wealth and power in that world economy pushed for a global standardization of taste biased toward their own cultural preferences. This article explores how that happened, first by pointing out how common the eating of whales is, as demonstrated by a sample of whale-eating experiences from around the world. The second section of this article examines whaling Americans' ambivalence toward whale foods during the heyday of the American whaling industry. The article closes with a discussion of how Americans' reluctance to incorporate whales into their own diet impinged on international conversations about whales as a sustainable resource. The American whaling industry was in part responsible for the modern depletion and, in some cases, near-extinction of certain whale populations, but it is not just the whales that became the industry's victim. Whale eaters also suffered. Petroleum and the invention of plastic made the American need for whale oil and whalebone obsolete and meant that, when an environmental conscience intent on saving whales emerged in the 1970s, Americans could embrace this particular cause without suffering any loss.
