After
the flensers have removed the blubber from a whale, the next job
is to deal with what is left. This is the muscle - meat - the
bones and internal organs. The whale carcass is handed over (not
literally, it is usually dragged by winch to another part of the
deck) to a group of men called the "Lemmers" who work on
the "Lemming Deck". This is a less skilled job than
flensing and so in the hierarchy of whalemen, the lemmers are a
step down in status and pay.
As might be expected a whale yields tons and
tons of meat. This wasn't always used in the best way. The whalers
themselves would eat this fresh meat served up in their galley,
but most of it would be ground up for use as food for livestock,
as pet food, or even as fertiliser. The only country that has ever carried
out whaling mainly for the meat for human consumption is Japan and
one of the arguments for Japan continuing whaling so long after
other country's had stopped and wanting to resume is that Japan
does and always has derived the most value from one whale of any
country that carried out whaling. Unfortunately most of the other
whaling nations didn't use the meat well. If it were not wasted,
then it was often used poorly to produce low quality and low value
goods, far less valuable than if the meat had been processed
properly by freezing or canning.
Other parts of the whales were used for various
purposes too, the guts and other internal organs went into the
production of meat meal for which there was a whole different set
of processing machinery below decks and a different set of holes
in the deck to feed the whale pieces into.
At various times, the endocrine organs were
separately saved for extracting hormones and other biochemicals
from them. The liver was sometimes dried and flaked and used when
back in the home country to provide a good source of vitamins.
The
very first amino acid sequence of a complex protein in the 1950's
was carried out on sperm whale myoglobin, the protein that holds
oxygen in muscle as haemoglobin does in the blood and so makes red
meat red. Sperm whales being great divers have large amounts of
this protein in their muscle and being whales, have a large amount
of this muscle, so it was an ideal plentiful source in the early
days of biochemical research when methods were relatively
primitive by today's standards.
Previous
