As I see it | To eat or not to eat

That is the question.

Exotic animals and their body parts have always been an integral part of Chinese cuisine. They run the gamut from the pangolin (穿山甲) and the Himalayan palm civet (果子狸) to bear’s paw and swallow’s spit. In terms of universal appeal and indispensability, few things come close to the venerable shark’s fin soup.

The tradition of making soups using dorsal and pectoral fins from tiger sharks can be traced all the way back to the Ming imperial kitchen some 400 years ago. At any given Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong, whether it is a wedding banquet or a corporate function, a feast is not a feast without the obligatory soup served on a twelve-course menu between the steamed grouper and the crispy chicken. Omitting the soup, on the other hand, will not only disappoint and offend guests, but also stir up rumours of financial ruin shrouding the host for years to come. Contrary to common belief in the West, shark’s fin soup is much more than a luxury. It is as much a part of the Cantonese culture as it is a social statement. It is our way of life.

The debate over the ecological impact and political correctness of eating shark’s fin first gained traction with the international press in the early 2000s. In the years since, with mounting pressure from environmentalist groups to protect other endangered sea creatures like the blue-fin tuna and the Siberian sturgeon, the question of whether restaurants should continue serving our favourite soup has taken on new urgency. The whole debate got under my skin because, on a selfish level, I genuinely enjoy the soup. Those precious shreds of cartilage floating in a delicious golden brown broth always bring back fond childhood memories of accompanying my parents to a glamorous Chinese banquet lifted straight from a Zhang Yimou movie set. On a more altruistic level, I was miffed because a slice of our cultural heritage is under siege. Once again, the Chinese ingenuity that turns the most improbable of ingredients into haute cuisine is being vilified as third-world savagery. It made me want to order the soup even more just as an act of defiance against Western prejudices.

That was until the ghastly reality of finning hit me like a ton of bricks, shattering all romanticism and sentimentality surrounding our culinary tradition. Look up the phrase “shark finning” on YouTube and you will find hundreds of graphic videos of fishermen hacking the fins off live sharks before the finless things are unceremoniously tossed back into the bloodied ocean to die a slow death. You would think humanity has made enough progress not to tolerate such cruelty even to animals. It makes me wonder why finning remains legal in most international waters when equally condemnable acts like tusking elephants and beheading gorillas are banned under conservation laws.

After the gruesome rite of slicing and chopping, heaps of harvested fins are then fork-lifted from the trawler and taken to markets by the truckload, fetching as much as US$500 per kilogramme. That’s enough financial incentive for fishermen in impoverished Latin America and Africa to switch from fishing to much more lucrative finning. But because only 30 out of 440 species of sharks have fins that are suitable for soups and most rookie finners can’t tell one species from another, thousands of unsold fins are left to rot in fish markets all over Asia.