Whale meal: the ground meat that fed livestock and fertilised the fields

After the oil came the meat. On a hundred-tonne blue whale, several tens of tonnes of flesh were of no interest to any European food market. They were not thrown away for all that: dried and ground, they left in sacks for farms the world over.

Two meals, not one

Two products that are often confused need to be told apart.

Meat meal comes from the muscle and the viscera, cooked to extract the residual oil, dried and then milled. Rich in protein, it serves as feed for cattle, poultry and fish farms.

Bone meal, covered on our page devoted to bone, teeth and scrimshaw, comes from the skeleton and is valued above all for its phosphorus. Both were produced side by side at the shore stations and on the factory ships, bagged and carried across the globe.

What this changes for profitability

This is the point that explains why industrial whaling lasted so long after the collapse of the lighting market.

A carcass processed in full yields a dozen or so distinct commercial streams. The oil pays for the season, but the meal, the fertiliser, the gelatine and the glands improve the margin, and above all they would remove a disposal cost had the waste needed to be got rid of. The factory ships fitted with a stern slipway and pressure cookers, from the 1920s onwards, were designed precisely for this complete use of the animal.

This logic has a perverse consequence. The more an industry makes use of the whole animal, the longer it stays profitable at low oil prices, and the longer it goes on taking animals.

The contemporary issue

This is not history alone. Wherever a hunt persists, the meal persists with it, and it raises a question of which the general public is largely unaware.

Cetacean by-products continue to enter animal feed and fertilisers. By that route they re-enter the human food chain indirectly, through the livestock fed and through the crops fertilised. A consumer who has never eaten whale may therefore have consumed its by-products without knowing it.

This indirect route raises the same health problem as direct consumption, described on our page devoted to whale meat: cetaceans are long-lived predators that accumulate persistent organic pollutants and mercury. Processing into meal does not make these contaminants disappear, it concentrates them.

To this is added a difficulty of traceability: an animal meal is an anonymous product once bagged, and the species of origin cannot be read from it without genetic analysis.

This page is part of our feature on whale products.