Yummy! At this Japanese market you can get ice cream made with raw whale meat

Japan loves its unusual ice cream flavors. Here you can find exotic but supposedly tasty varieties such as octopus, raw horse meat, garlic, shark fin and cow tongue. It’s the stuff of internet listicle legends. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Kanto region, given the country’s refusal to end its barbaric whaling practices, there would be an ice cream vendor at a farmers’ market named Hanamaru Ichiba in the city of Minami-Boso selling a variant of ice cream called Umami Kujira Soft call – soft ice cream with raw whale meat.

According to Japanese newspaper Asahi, the farmers’ market is located at a roadside rest stop in the Wadacho district of Minami-Boso, home to the Kanto region’s only whaling station.

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People in Japan rarely eat whales anymore, even though whales used to be a much more important part of the Japanese diet. Whale now only makes up about 0.1 percent of the meat the Japanese consume. It’s not like people eat thick, cartoonishly large whale poles that hang several feet from plates on all sides. Instead, it is mostly treated as a novelty or specialty food, a category that whale meat ice cream also falls into.

The raw whale meat is dark red and sprinkled with pepper. The translation of the original article seems a little sketchy, but it seems to indicate that, in addition to the pepper, there is also some soy sauce involved, which “cannot mask the characteristic smell of the dark red flesh.” Mmmm. I love it when my ice cream has a distinctive smell that can’t be masked no matter how hard I try, little green pine air fresheners be damned.

The whole thing is served on soft serve ice cream, the entire confection is then served in a cone and topped with a sticky rice cake shaped like a whale – a move apparently designed specifically to mock the whale community.

The Waleis cells for 680 yen, which is about $4.50. The novel snack has become a real hit at the farmers market. Some people Asahi spoke to said the combination of ice cream and raw whale meat was “less incongruous” than one might think. Not necessarily a convincing confirmation. It sounds like the rest of that thought is “but it’s still gross.”