In this chapter, Ishmael ponders the strangeness of eating whales and, by extension, eating fellow creatures in general. He concludes that even the most apparently “civilized” men are actually barbaric: “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds...Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the Day of Judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground, and feastiest on their bloated livers in your pate-de-foie-gras.”
