Cook wrote in his diary —“of equal interest to the naturalist and the cook” as he began eating penguins. They taste like “a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce”.
Today’s polar explorers don’t have to eat penguins anymore. Unless in a survival situation. However, the almost unpredictable Antarctic weather can still cause scientists to run out of food. One of my friends was in such a situation and had to eat penguins – apparently they taste like “oily chicken”, similar to what Cook wrote back in the old days.
There is always a story more to it: The early explorers did also experiments with penguins. Dr. Gazert (Drygalski expedition, 1901 -1903) once minced penguin meat and pressed all the blood out of it to find out how much blood is in that animal. He wanted to find out why the meat is so dark. In his diary was no sufficient answer to that problem.
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Just seeing this way to late, but thanks for the interesting comment Ursula ! Hope all is well and we can see each other rather sooner than later 🙂
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Hi, hope you are far away from the little bugger, called Covid. We are overworked as always and it is really amazing that nothing is slowing down because of the pandemic – it is becoming more, surprisingly. 🙂
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