I’m sure that many of our readers have been required to travel to foreign lands. (The vast majority actually live outside the US, with a very heavy residential emphasis in the Far East.) With that travel comes the opportunity - or inevitability - of experiencing many foods that we would have remained unaccustomed to if we had remained at home.
A lot of those food experiences have been very pleasant ones. Some have not. I don’t believe that I could face another sheep’s eyeball, for example; and I will never forget the faces of my Japanese hosts on the first occasion that I tried to eat Uni. It is very expensive and is often described as the roe of the sea urchin although it is, in fact, the gonads of the animal, and its creamy texture is beloved as a sushi item by a goodly proportion of the Japanese population. I must side with that smaller percentage of Japanese in finding uni quite revolting. It is a complete opposite to that other sashimi item from the Pacific Coast of North America, the Spot Prawn, 90% of whose harvest is frozen for the Japanese market. This incredibly sweet prawn is one of the Northwest’s secrets.
In Chinese culinary circles – although my first experience was actually in Thailand – a delicacy is shark fin, usually in a soup. This is an expensive food for the table and is one that has become increasingly attacked by environmentalists and people who have some care for animals. Harvested from the shark, the fin is the only part of the fish that is used: the remainder is tossed back into the ocean to die.
Contrast this obsession for the fin with the opposite obsession in New Zealand, where the fish in fish-and-chips will often be shark. There the fin is the undesirable cast-off.
If, in fact, you taste shark fin by itself – as I have – there is virtually no taste to it. Shark fin soup is really tasty, but only because of the other ingredients in the dish, particularly the pork and chicken base. Nevertheless, it is regarded by many Chinese as being a status symbol for treating guests: impressing them with the amount of money spent on their entertainment. There are also tales – unproven, it seems – that shark fin is a cure for various cancers.
Hong Kong is probably the worst place in the world for dealing in illegal, illegitimate or questionable materials of one kind or another, and attempts to ban the sale of shark’s fins have been met with disbelief. But this dubious ingredient really came to the fore in 2005, as Disney was preparing to open its Hong Kong theme park (with an incredibly large and increasingly affluent potential audience just across the border). The company announced that one of the banquet items at a food concession would be shark fin soup.
The environmentalists went nuts and threw Disney’s own work in shark protection back in its corporate face. Threats to boycott the company worldwide, together with continual pressure in shaming the company, worked, and the idea of selling the soup in the park was reversed.
Since then it has taken considerable international effort to put even further pressure on the shark fin producers. Hawaii has finally come through with a bill that outlaws the import, sale, or possession of shark fins from 1 July 2011, making it the first US state to do so.
Violation of the ban could be expensive for those trading in the delicacy. A first offense could cost $15,000, with penalties increasing thereafter, including jail time for a third offence. The time between the passage of the bill and its enforcement is to allow for establishments to work through current inventories of the fins.
This is certainly a start in reducing the 70 million sharks that it is estimated are killed every year for their fins and countries like Canada and Ireland have been closely following the Hawaiian initiative with a thought to copying it.
About 13% of Hawaii’s population is of Chinese origin, but the biggest offender in the consumption of shark fins in the islands is by Japanese tourists, who find the dish about one-quarter of the price it is back home. Worldwide, the biggest consumption will remain in Hong Kong...where any legislation to ban the shark fin will only raise the price to those who want to continue to celebrate eightieth birthdays, particularly, in the way they always have.
If you really have to taste shark fin soup, book passage to Hawaii fairly quickly and get reservations at Vienna Hou’s Kirin restaurant in Honolulu for their $48 plate. This also seems to be one of the few Chinese restaurants on the islands where the servers are polite. Confidentially? The dim sum is a much better, much tastier buy and will leave your conscience intact.
