Nearly 85 percent of public elementary and junior high schools in Wakayama, Japan's western whaling heartland, have begun whale-meat lunches. School officials said there were positive responses from children.

``Whale meat is served as burgers or meatballs or marinated with sweet and sour sauce so that children can eat it easily,'' said Wakayama education official Tetsuji Sawada.

Nearly 58,000 children are said to be enjoying whale meat in the prefecture, 450 kilometers west of Tokyo.

International whaling was banned in 1982, with environmentalists arguing whale populations were declining and that the hunt was cruel. Whale, a traditional part of the Japanese diet, went off nearly all school menus.

Since 1987, however, Japan has used a loophole in the global moratorium and killed smaller minke whales for what it calls research. The estimated 2,000 tonnes of meat from each year's cull ends up in supermarkets and restaurants across Japan.

But Sawada said such whale meat was too expensive for school lunch and the Wakayama educational office lobbied Japan's Fisheries Agency to lower prices. ``There was demand for whale meat, but we simply could not afford it for school lunches,'' he said.

``Before, the price of 100 grams of whale meat cost about 500 yen (HK$37.05), but now it costs about 125 yen - equivalent to chicken and pork.''