When it comes to eating, two Gold standards
Mark Gold tries to save sea creatures; his brother Jonathan delights in eating them. It can be an unpalatable topic at the dinner table.
Mark Gold, the esteemed marine scientist and president of Heal the Bay, knew it was only a matter of time before his older brother, Jonathan Gold, the equally esteemed Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic, would pick up a set of chopsticks and commit the ultimate act of fraternal betrayal.
"From his perspective, if you've already eaten Jamaican goat penis, what's wrong with whale?" Mark asked.
Jonathan -- reached on his cellphone this week while eating puffer fish at Dae Bok in Koreatown -- first corrected his ever-tut-tutting brother:
"It was Vietnamese goat penis."
Look, he added, he doesn't promote eating whale. And it's not as if the whale was harpooned in Santa Monica Bay.
He happened to be in South Korea, coming out of a whale museum, when, perhaps ironically, he came upon a row of whale restaurants. A man whose curious palate once led him to eat a live prawn as it glared back at him, antennae spiraling in fear, he knew he had to try. In his words: "It was there."
And, he concluded, it was delectable.
Two prominent personalities in their own circles, Jonathan, 48, and Mark, 45, for years have been sparring, in good humor, about their differing gustatory predilections. But the whale eating, which Jonathan wrote about Oct. 16 in his widely read column in the L.A. Weekly, raised the ante in a most public way.
"A couple minutes later, a waitress returns with a platter of whale yuk hwe," he wrote. "The vividly red meat has been cut into thin strips and tossed with sesame oil and slivered Korean pear, and I am surprised to discover that whale is delicious, leaner than beef, with a rich, mineral taste and a haunting, almost waxy aftertaste that I can't quite place.
"I am already anticipating the nasty glare I will inevitably get from my marine-scientist brother, Mark, who as the leader of Heal the Bay has dedicated his life to pretty much the opposite of this."
You can envision Jonathan chuckling aloud as he typed that last sentence -- much as he envisioned the "blankness" glazing the prawn's eyes as it succumbed to blunt trauma in his mouth.
"I wonder where the line is," Mark said this week as he drove from a meeting with Santa Monica officials over cleaning up the beach. "When does cannibalism come up as a food choice when you're on the whale route?"
