Selling snake oil is a tradition

When Marie Curie was being feited for her two nobel prizes, there were plenty of charlatans who were ready to leap upon her work to sell the latest ‘snake oil’ curative.

The number of medicines that suddenly appeared in the early 1900s based on radium and other similar products was both amazing and scary. What damage was done to whole populations in the 1900s was only overshadowed by the First World War.

But it seems the charlatans are not confiend to history. Now, faced with an ever increasing mountain of whale meat that they cannot sell (apart from to dogs), it appears that the Japanese Government are claiming whale meat is a ‘health product’. 

Japan’s Institute of Cetaean Research (ICR), which is a front for the Japanese commercial whaling industry, has launched a new campaign to promote whale meat as a nutritious food that ‘enhances physical strength and reduces fatigue.’

Australia’s ABC reports that “With about 5,000 tonnes of whale meat sitting unwanted in freezers around Japan, the country’s Institute for Cetacean Research has decided to launch a new campaign to promote the by-product of its so-called scientific whaling program.

Once popular in school lunches, younger generations of Japanese rarely, if ever, eat whale.”

WDC warned in our publication ‘Reinventing the Whale’ that the whalers, increasingly desperate to keep their dying industry alive would revert to claiming that they had the new ‘snake oil’. Lets just hope the Japanese public don’t fall for this one as the public did for Radium in the 1900s.