By Elin Brimheim Heinesen
Those who ask such a question, simply lack a deep understanding of the unique living conditions in countries such as the Faroe Islands. They fail to grasp the fundamental reasons which enable residents to inhabit these remote places with a harsh, sub-Arctic, oceanic climate with very little arable land—not least, why there are supermarkets there at all.
Less than 3 percent of the land in the mountainous, steep Faroese landscape is suitable for agriculture. This greatly limits the ability of the local population to grow food. They can, at the most, grow a little potatoes, beets and rhubarbs. Growing fruits and vegetables sustainably in greenhouses has proven unviable, despite several attempts, and certainly not in the quantities that would be required to keep almost 50,000 Faroe Islanders alive, so they cannot rely on local agriculture for their sustenance.
In sub-Arctic regions, plant growth is inherently restricted. Consequently, the Faroese people depend on local animal life, either by consuming it directly or by selling livestock and fish to other countries to afford imports of fruits and vegetables. These environmental and climatic conditions dictate the lifestyle of the Faroe Islanders. Without adhering to these natural limitations, survival in the harsh climates in the great Arctic and sub-Arctic regions on earth would be impossible, forcing millions of people who live there to migrate south to areas with more fertile land—regions already burdened by overcrowding, which will only worsen due to climate change forcing people from more southern areas to flee north as well.
The Faroe Islanders have to live by what is accessible to them. Life on the islands requires—and has for more than a thousand years required—some very specific skills that the Faroese people have developed and perfected to be able to survive this place. Besides the little dry land at their disposal, their “land” is the sea around the Faroe Islands, and it is from there, they draw far the most of what they feed on or live by. This includes fish, sheep, cattle, hares, birds and … yes, pilot whales.
You Have to Live By What Is Available
Living surrounded by the ocean profoundly influences the Faroese diet, which contrasts sharply with diets in—let’s say—Italy, Hungary, Mongolia, Sierra Leone or Australia, where they have a completely different climate and therefore quite different food options.
People all over the world consume the food they are able to obtain where they live. You have no other choice but to live by what is available in your environment. This is what becomes your food culture and, noteably, the basis for your economy in the long term. In the Faroe Islands it is a fact that fishing / marine harvest is the “agriculture” that is their primary means of sustenance, because there is not much else to eat or earn money by. In order to survive the Faroese people simply do not have other choices but to harvest their marine resources.
The Faroe Islanders are thus, basically, a people which exist only by virtue of what nature has to offer to them. Specifically, Faroe Islanders live mostly of fish exports, which account for over 90 percent of their exports. They make a good living out of it. The Faroese people simply base their good standard of living on the ocean wealth.
No Supermarkets Without Killing Animals
Many foreigners obviously struggle to grasp—or familiarize themselves with the natural living conditions in the Faroe Islands, because they themselves live under quite different conditions and measure everything according to their own reality. They just see the good standard of living in the Faroe Islands, which is on par with the standard of living in other countries in the western world. And they see the many Faroese supermarkets and the abundance of fruits and vegetables on the shelves, and can’t understand why the Faroese people—just as they do themselves—don’t just opt for a plant-based diet over meat.
This perspective overlooks a vital reality: without the sustainable harvesting of animals, there would be no fruits or vegetables on supermarket shelves. They forget that the Faroese high standard of living is intricately linked to the fact that Faroe Islanders kill animals. It is precisely their ability to hunt whales, sheep, and fish that enables them to afford the imports seen in local stores.
It is only because the Faroe Islanders have killed whales, sheep and fish for their own consumption, plus killed some more fish for export that they can afford to import all the fruits and vegetables you see in supermarkets in the Faroe Islands. Without the skills of the Faroe Islanders enabling them to kill animals in an efficient and sustainable way (the Faroese, certainly, are not interested in cutting the branch off on which they are sitting), there would be no supermarkets to sell fruits and vegetables.
Killing of Animals Makes Fruit and Vegetables Affordable
Should the Faroese be forced to stop killing animals, let’s say pilot whales, for instance, they would need to compensate for the loss by increasing their catch of other animals, like fish, to maintain their economy. In practice it would mean that many more fish in the sea around the Faroe Islands and many more foreign cows, pigs, chickens or other animals would have to die and be slaughtered, in order for the Faroese to cover their food consumption as a replacement for the loss of whale meat, which represents around one fourth or fifth of the Faroese meat consumption.
Or let’s say if the Faroese – in accordance with many a vegan’s dream – suddenly all became vegans / vegetarians—or let’s go even further: If the entire world population was vegan / vegetarian, and the Faroese therefore couldn’t kill any fish, any sheep, any birds or any whales anymore – well, that would mean that there would be no indigenous resources necessary for sustenance—and therefore no food at all in the islands, which would make survival on the islands completely impossible, leaving no means to export products and generate income for imports.
Thus, even if the entire population adopted a vegan lifestyle, they would still necessitate a subsistence strategy that relies on animal harvesting to survive, making it clear why the Faroese staunchly defend their traditional practice, because they know they would simply not be able to exist without it. It’s the base for their whole existence.
Cultural Clashes Between Urban People and Faroe Islanders
I myself, like most Faroese people, grew up in a family where most of the family members had typical Faroese occupations. They were fishermen, sailors and sheep farmerspeople who lived in the middle of and directly by nature. They would never survive if they couldn’t use the natural resources available in their immediate environment. In my childhood, I lived in the middle of their world. I learned the natural rhythm over the year, the seasons the Faroese have adapted their lives to, and all the traditions in the different seasons associated with sheep farming and fishing. Something that most globalized and high tech city residents know very little about and / or have been more or less alienated from.
Let me also tell you that I have lived much of my adult life, actually a quarter of a century, in a major city—namely in Copenhagen. I therefore know the mindset one often meets, especially among urban residents. You could say that I have a good basis for comparison. I have seen the Faroese and Danish (Copenhagen) culture both inside and outside. And they are very different.
In contrast to the Faroese people, many urban dwellers live in a more or less manufactured environment that shields them from nature’s harsh realities. They may not fully appreciate the challenges faced by those whose existence is intertwined with the land and sea. Their almost entirely man-made, not to say ‘artificial’ world—which certainly feels very real to them—is in fact very far from the harsh life in the North Atlantic where humans are much more subject to the whims of nature. Urban residents are not forced to, in the same degree, to be responsible for their own survival by living directly by natural resources. Urban dwellers have the luxury that they can entrust their survival—i.e. provision of food—to the system and let others do the dirty job, which is to kill the animals they eat.
Urban People Humanize Animals
Therefore, most urban residents don’t really know what it means—or what it involves not having any other choice, if you want to survive, but to make a living of killing animals, as many people in the sub-Arctic and Arctic regions have to do to a much larger extent. Therefore urban residents often perceive animals differently. Animals—especially mammals—are creatures many urban residents mostly perceive as sweet, nice pets. The animals are humanized (in other words, anthropomorphized)—i.e. attributed human qualities and personified to such an extent that they rank on par with humans or higher. The higher the “cuteness” factor, the more these people will be offended by the fact that the animals are killed in order to end up as food for humans.
Therefore, killing of animals (especially those who are perceived as particularly sweet, such as whales for example) will be compared to the murdering of people. Some people even relate so closely to animals emotionally, that they set them higher than humans. They will defend the animals with their lives, and the world should therefore partout be forced to regard the animals in the same way. It’s this kind of people who join rabid animal welfare organizations like Sea Shepherd, for example.
The Faroe Islanders are different in a way that, although they have been modernized and globalized in recent years and are, in very many ways, similar to urban residents to confusion—and although many young people, especially in Tórshavn, are very much influenced by the outside world and no longer have the same feel for what makes the wheels spin in the Faroe Islands, most Faroe Islanders still feel , that they have a very close connection to the old way of living and surviving in the Faroe Islands in close harmony with nature. They still have a direct “hands on” understanding of the importance of the natural resources, and the fact that their own survival actually depends on the killing of animals.
Great Respect For What Ensures the Survival
Faroese nature is hard to overlook. You just can’t escape nature when you live in such a small archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic. Nature is omnipresent all around you all the time. You can’t possibly forget it. Especially because the climate is so harsh for most of the year, so you can’t help that you literally feel nature with your entire body every day when you step outside the door.
Although everyday life for many Faroe Islanders (especially in the only city in the Faroe Islands, Torshavn, with 20,000 inhabitants) might look like everyday life as it is for people in most of the Western world with it’s shopping centres, supermarkets, cafés and restaurants, there are so many other aspects of life in the Faroe Islands that are still very different because of the natural environment, the islanders live in.
Although the Faroese people appear modern and well-educated, it is a fact that everyone—every single Faroese person—is still very dependent on the relatively limited range of natural resources they have access to in this small country in the middle of the vast ocean. This fact is something that almost every Faroe Islander is very aware of. Most of them know what this nation builds its entire existence on, and therefore (usually) have great respect for, what’s ensuring the foundations of everyone’s survival in the islands.
Self-Provided Food an Important Part of Culture
It may well be that many Faroese people live a modern life in line with Copenhageners, for example, but at the same time many of them still provide food for themselves and their families in the old ways too—at least in part.
Something which is very difficult for outsiders to understand is that it feels like a necessity for many Faroe Islanders to live both a modern and a more traditional life where you hunt your own food. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the Faroese people, due to the very real risk of recurrent economic crises, can never feel completely certain that the system will catch you if you fall. Therefore, people make it a point of honor to be as self-sufficient as possible.
The entire community is designed in a way where people appreciate and agree that it is necessary to interrupt your daily work when the time has come to bring the sheep home and slaughter them, or go hunting for fulmars and other birds, or hare-hunting, or attending pilot whale killing—and also to prepare and store the food you have provided for yourself and your family.
These foods, which people themselves provide, constitute a large part of the total consumption of food and are indispensable for most families – especially for the 12% of the Faroe Islanders, living on or below the poverty line.
Cultural Imperialism to Expect Vegan Lifestyle of the Faroese
In some years now, Faroe Islands has been invaded every summer by a lot of people who bring their vegan- or vegetarian lifestyle with them, many incited by organizations like Sea Shepherd. They come with the intention to trying to force the Faroese people to abandon the life that has always been natural for people to live in these parts. They do not understand that the local food from nature’s larder is inextricably linked to the Faroese people’s survival and culture as a whole. They do not understand that when Faroese people kill whales, for example, it’s not so fundamentally different from what butchers do in their own country. The difference, though, is that in more southern countries, people have the opportunity to choose to provide food for themselves by growing plants rather than killing animals. In the Faroe Islands, they don’t have this choice.
Therefore, it can’t be regarded as anything other than cultural imperialism when outsiders invade a country (as it happened in the summers of 2014 and 2015) in a number equal to one million foreigners invading Great Britain or France, for instance, interfering with people’s lives there, soiling them with smear campaigns in the media around the world, making all sorts of contortions to prevent them from eating the food they have always been used to eating, and preventing them to survive the way they have always done in the natural environment in which they live.
It can’t be regarded as anything other than cultural imperialism to travel to a foreign country that you have no relation to, to tell the people who live there, they must live in ways that do not feel natural to them and require them to live a different kind of life that is totally incompatible with the environment, the Faroese people live in. How can you demand that the Faroese should adopt a lifestyle that basically belongs to a completely different climate and a completely different environment, and in the long run would effectively mean that the livelihood in these islands would crumble?
Will They Ever Understand?
Faroese people can defend their lifestyle and fish and meat-based survival all they want against attacks from Sea Shepherd, for example, but fanatical anti-whaling activists will never let themselves be convinced anyway – and hardly any vegetarians / vegans around the world either.
But perhaps it would be possible to explain to ordinary reasonable people around the world—especially those who are happy to eat meat and fish themselves—why the Faroe Islanders have to kill animals / fish, and thus make people understand that no matter if Faroe Islanders become vegans / vegetarians or not, it is still absolutely necessary for them to kill animals/fish anyway to export, if they expect to have any hope of being able to maintain a sustainable society and survive on these windswept islands with not many other resources than just that.
