for the variety of their uses and services. They carry heavy loads. The hair is spun into rope and woven into cloth. The hide is used for leather, shoes, coats, bags for storing grain, and for the construction of simple boats, as well as for tent-like, temporary housing. (More permanent homes may include some of the bones for structural support.) Its horns serve as a bugle, emitting a distinct sound when properly shaped and blown, used by monks or yak-herders to signal the time of day, to call for help, signal danger, or simply to communicate. And, as is true for its American relative, the dried dung is used for fuel.
During the funeral rites of the Akha hill-tribe in Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan, a sacrificial buffalo is committed to the deceased. The dead animal is laid out for a day and covered with paddy, while the spirit priest prays over it. Later, it will provide a feast for the entire village.
Yet, it is its use as a food that gives the yak its reputation. The milk yields excellent butter and curd, and the flesh is of high quality, eaten roasted or dried, fried, boiled, baked, broiled, or made into a stew or soup, with or without noodles. Its meat is available everywhere in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, where it is found on most restaurant menus, stuffed into dumplings, sliced into steaks, air-dried, and minced into “yak burgers.” (When China invaded the country and the Dalai Lama and some eighty thousand Tibetans fled to neighboring Nepal and India, they took this cuisine with them. In Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, several Tibetan restaurants offer a full range of yak dishes.) Because the yak, like other animals, tends to get tough and stringy with age, most of the meat will have been ground to ease the chewing process. The taste is like cheap hamburger meat.
However popular the flesh, it is the butter that likely will give this mammal its culinary immortality. Read any book about Nepal or Tibet, or check the staggering number of Internet web sites about these countries-hundreds and perhaps thousands of them posted by foreigners who recall their visit as if in a state of religious transcendence—and it is inevitable that the subject of yak butter is mentioned.
When CNN founder Ted Turner bought this Montana ranch west of Yellowstone National Park, he replaced the cattle with bison, which now number 12,000.
Yak milk is rich, valued for its seven percent fat content, compared to half that for cattle. The butter is used as a thickener for soups and mixed with ground barley in a tea called tsampa, a drink consumed in vast quantity at all hours of the day and night. The whitish-yellow fat may also be burned in lamps to illuminate tents, homes, and temples, and is applied as a body lotion or hair pomade. In Buddhist monasteries, monks boil up huge cauldrons of the stuff to offer visitors in tea. The natives’ clothing is redolent, committing to the air a sort of greasy, smoky smell. The odor is strong—some say rancid-yet it is so pervasive that because you cannot avoid it, after a while you stop noticing it. It becomes a part of you.
And you hold out your cup for more.
An Akha spirit priest in northern Thailand sacrifices a tethered buffalo with a single stab from a spear. Immediately, water will be poured down its throat so that it will make no noise in dying.
At the ritual slaughter of another buffalo, in a Pathan village on the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, the butcher washes his hands after cutting the animal’s throat.
Pathan tribesmen from the village of Kado, near Peshawar, enjoy a buffalo biriani feast from the animal pictured above right.
The sleek braided hair of a Tibetan pilgrim praying outside the Jokhang in Lhasa owes its lustre to a yak butter pomade.
whale
All hell broke loose in 1998 when the school district of the seaside city of Shimonoseki in Japan announced an addition to the upcoming year’s school lunch menu: whale meat.
Greenpeace went ballistic and thousands of save-the-whale crusaders worldwide—along with fans of the Free Willy movies—went to bed angry. When the Japanese defended their move, saying it was designed to teach some 25,000 elementary and primary school students pride in their town’s historical role as a major port for their country’s whaling fleet, it only made people madder.
No food harvest in the present time stirs more controversy than the killing of whales. Not the tiger, panda, elephant, dolphin, monk seal, manatee, bald eagle, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, chimpanzee, or any other endangered or threatened species. People who killed whales were crazy, the “save the whales” contingent argue: “Didn’t you read Moby Dick?” Of course, it’s not that simple.
Moby Who?
To understand how whale meat found its way into school lunches in Japan and onto grills in faraway Iceland, Norway, Denmark and elsewhere—and why it is not eaten in most places today—suggests a fast look at whaling history.
Many whales are threatened with extinction today because unregulated whaling activity—led by the United States, England, and Norway—annihilated the oceanic population in much the same way many other large mammals were hunted to near-extinction in the North American and African continents. Whaling by these countries was conducted to collect whale oil, the market for which died with the discovery of petroleum. The market for whale bone, used in the construction of corsets and other female foundation garments, also died when those garments became obsolete. It wasn’t concern for the survival of the great beasts that ended whaling. It was commerce.
With the market for the oil gone and no apparent interest in the meat, commercial whaling became unprofitable and the United States quit whaling in 1940, the United Kingdom in 1963. A resolution calling for a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment in 1972 and the IWC followed with an open-ended moratorium effective from 1986. Iceland withdrew from the IWC six years later and Norway resumed whaling in 1993.
Surveys show that most people believe Japan is the only country defending this age-old harvest and that only the Japanese continue to regard the meat, blubber, and other by-products as a part of daily life. While it’s true that Japan leads all other countries in its whaling activity-sending the meat into markets and onto dinner plates, as well as including it in school lunches—Japan is not alone. There are other countries that approve whaling, Iceland, Denmark and Norway among them, as well as Canada, Russia and a handful of South Pacific nations, which have refused to agree to international bans. In addition, aboriginal subsistence whaling is permitted by native peoples in Alaska, the far-eastern part of Russia, in Greenland, and in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. What’s more, there is a strengthening international voice to cancel the commercial whaling ban altogether.
In fact, as long ago as 1972 and 1973 the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the committee responsible for counting the world’s whales, by consensus at its meetings said that “there is no scientific justification or need for a whaling moratorium.” This opinion did not match that of the anti-whaling member nations who controlled the IWC, however, and the judgment was ignored. This same opinion was put forth by the committee once more in 1993, but again brought no change.
Then, in 1997 at the bi-annual meeting of the highly esteemed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the organization generally regarded as having the last word on the subject of any creature thought to be in jeopardy, member nations stunned environmental advocates everywhere by supporting the sustainable use of abundant whale stocks, voting to allow trade in whale products fifty-seven to fifty-one. Thus, the majority endorsed the notion that whales could be killed and eaten, but since a two-thirds majority was needed to overturn a ban, the prohibition remained in place.
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