Shark Fin Soup: Here’s what happens when you order a $65 bowl
NEW YORK — Two weeks ago, when I ordered shark fin soup for dinner at the Golden Unicorn, a banquet hall in Chinatown, my waiter seemed confused. The dish is usually reserved for grand occasions, like weddings and high-end business lunches, and I was casually asking for it as an appetizer to my roasted duck.
“It’s very expensive,” the waiter said solemnly, pointing at the price printed on the menu: $65. I told him I knew that and still wanted to try it. He nodded, wrote down my order, and walked away.
I half-expected him not to bring me the soup, which I had been having trouble locating in the city. There are more than 55 restaurants in New York that sell shark fin soup, according to the Animal Welfare Institute. But last month legislators in New York put forth a bill that would ban the possession, sale, and trade of shark fin in the state as early as next year, which has added stigma to an already controversial dish. California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington have passed their own bans.
Shark fin soup is considered by the Chinese to be a symbol of prosperity and a conferrer of health benefits, the sine qua non of luxury dining. But it also happens to drive the shark fin trade, which scientists identify as an unsustainable practice causing the collapse of shark populations around the world.
Those who are against the ban — restaurant owners and shark fin industry lobbyists, for example — have said that it is culturally discriminatory, that shark fin soup is part of a thousand-year-old Chinese tradition, that the shark fin trade is sustainable.
Advocates, scientists, and legislators alike tell a different story — that millions of sharks are uselessly killed every year, that the soup is only a status symbol — though on both sides absolutes and falsities flourish.
More Than A Status Symbol
I was curious about trying the soup because I had read that the fin is tasteless. Why would anyone pay so much money for a dish whose main flavor comes from the chicken stock in the broth?
Peter How is the president of the Asian American Restaurant Association and owner of Jade Asian, a Chinese banquet hall in Flushing, Queens, that sells shark fin soup. “It’s known that shark fins are tasteless,” How explained in an email, “and because of that it requires more detail when cooking it.”
How was the only manager of a restaurant selling shark fin soup who spoke with me.
I called three other popular Chinese banquet halls in the city that serve the dish — including Grand Harmony, Jing Fong, and yes, Golden Unicorn — to discuss the ban. All of the managers hung up on me in haste the minute I mentioned shark fins.
How doesn’t believe that the fin ban will hurt his business, but he is still against it. He considers the soup to be more than just a status symbol and said that the delicacy “is a show of respect, honor, and appreciation to the guests during weddings, banquets, and important business deals.”
He also told me that some consume powdered fin, believing it to be a defense against cancer. But a new study released last month by Marine Drugs, a research journal, suggests that consumption of shark fin may increase the risk of exposure to neurodegenerative toxins. If the price of the soup is not repellent, then that finding might be.
“Purely Business”
Last fall, Po Wing Hong Food Market in Chinatown stopped ordering the fins, which come dried and frozen and can cost hundreds of dollars per pound. Fins can be found in grocery stores all throughout Chinatown.
The two times I went down to Po Wing Hong, I found shark fin for sale, on display in the front window; most likely, the remaining inventory has not been exhausted yet, which may suggest that fewer people in the city are consuming the ingredient.
Frank Ng, the manager of the market, said that the decision to stop ordering the fins was “purely business.” “People are more aware of the environmental implications of obtaining shark fins, and frankly, they’re willing to give it up,” he said. “The economy’s not great, and people don’t want to spend a ton of money.”
He added that the store didn’t want to take the risk of carrying more inventory in case the shark fin ban is passed.
Last spring, Shun Lee West, an upscale Chinese restaurant near Lincoln Center, decided to remove shark fin from its menu.
“It’s been in the news all over the place, lots of environmental groups have pressured,” said Henry Nuesch, manager of the restaurant. “And it’s not worth the effort, so I just said, ‘OK, let’s stop.’”
So far, he said, there has been no backlash from customers. “The average American doesn’t really eat shark fin. It’s the Asians that like the shark fin — it is a big part of Chinese culture.
The Problem With Finning
In fact, Hong Kong and China are the biggest consumers of the dish.
According to Demian Chapman, a shark scientist at Stony Brook University, the demand for shark fin started rising in the 1980s with the emergence of a new Chinese middle class.
“As a result,” he explained, “fisheries around the world started targeting sharks, and initially it was very common for the fishermen to just take the fin and discard the meat.” This to save room for fins in the hulls of boats.
He said that that practice — known as finning — caused an outcry in the ‘80s, and a lot of countries responded by banning it.
There are videos all over the Internet of fishermen slicing off the fins of live sharks and pushing their bleeding bodies back into the water — a disturbing performance of brutal profligacy that is hard to stomach. This is the practice — and the image — most people associate with shark fin soup.
But Chapman said that the main issue is not finning — which still happens, and is, of course, unethical — but the sustainability of the shark fin trade. Sharks are fish, but reproduce more like mammals: they breed infrequently; the female gestates the offspring; and the larger species take a decade or more to reproduce. This makes them more vulnerable to overfishing.
“There is evidence of shark decline in every ocean you can find,” Chapman said. “If you don’t manage a fishery, and the fishery is being overcapitalized, there’s a very high probability of causing a population decline, and that’s what we think is going on.”
The Ocean Suffers
Sharks are apex predators: they keep mid-level predators in the ocean in check. Researchers have already found evidence that declining shark populations along the Eastern seaboard have had deleterious effects.
In one study from 2007, researchers found that the dwindling number of large sharks led to a boom in the population of the cownose ray, which decimated scallop populations in North Carolina.
Last year, the United States enacted the Shark Conservation Act, which closed a loophole in the the country’s existing ban on finning, according to Wired.
Other countries have passed similar regulations — Canada and Australia, for example — while some have banned shark fishing altogether.
“Here in the U.S., we’ve done good work, we’ve banned the finning of sharks,” said Beth Lowell, campaign director of Oceana, an ocean conservation organization. “The problem is outside the U.S., it’s still happening in many places.”
Lowell explained that the push to ban shark fins is an issue of conservation. The ivory trade was killing elephants, she said, and the way to stop that was to go after the trade of the product that was driving the depletion of the species.
73 Million
It’s widely said that 73 million sharks are killed every year to support the shark fin trade. But that number, Chapman said, is highly misleading.
The number 73 million is actually the upper limit of an estimate, by researchers, of the number of sharks killed for the fin trade from 1996 to 2000. The lower limit is 26 million and the median estimate about 38 million.
“The fin trade is hard to monitor,” Chapman said. “We think it’s tens of millions, but it implies that we have much better information than we do.”
The Dissent
Giam Choo Hoo, however, would disagree. He is a member of the Animals Committee of the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, and is one of the few who has argued in favor of maintaining the shark fin trade.
He claims that 80 percent of sharks are accidentally caught and that developing countries catch 70 percent of the sharks, citing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as a source. Giam also says that of all the species of sharks, only three are listed in Appendix II of CITES, which restricts trade on species threatened with extinction. These include the basking shark, the great white shark and the whale shark.
But when I confronted Chapman with those figures, he told me that “a lot of the things he’s saying are guesses … there is no solid information on the fin trade.”
Chapman added that using CITES was very misleading. It takes a two-thirds majority decision to get declining animals listed; often countries highly enmeshed with the shark fin trade don’t want the hassle of having to monitor the industry, so they will work to keep animals from being added to the list, he said.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed a number of shark species, including the hammerhead, the whitetip, and the mako, as either globally endangered or vulnerable to extinction. Declining populations are linked to bycatch, or unintentional fishing — due to long-line fishing, for example — though Chapman told me that he doesn’t believe bycatch happens incidentally anymore, as shark fins are such a lucrative commodity.
Moreover, Giam has said that banning shark fins is culturally discriminatory, a form of Sinophobia.
But as Juliet Eilperin, national environment reporter for The Washington Post, pointed out to me, some societies have taken steps to stop purchasing beluga caviar that comes from endangered sturgeon. “So was that an attack on Russian culture?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
As it turns out, Giam is also a representative of the shark fin industry in Singapore, featured in Eilperin’s book, Demon Fish, about the world of sharks.
“I have been called and labeled differently, both by supporters and detractors,” Giam told me via email. “I stand by what I say. You, and the world, will judge me by the data and facts I publish. Many of my deductions and conclusions I’m sure are wrong but they are based on facts.”
A 1,000-Year-Old Tradition
In Eilperin’s book, Giam explains that shark fin soup became a delicacy 1,000 years ago, in the Sung Dynasty. During the Ming Dynasty, in the fifteenth century, it came to prominence as an important banquet food.
How, Jade Asian’s owner, also cites this thousand-year tradition to legitimize shark fin soup. But Patrick Kwan, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States and a Chinese American, thinks it is an exaggeration to say that shark fin soup is a centerpiece of Chinese culture.
Kwan said he finds it offensive to associate Chinese culture with such extreme cruelty. His father works with How as the vice president of the Asian American Restaurant Association. (“It’s an ongoing conversation,” Kwan said.)
Grace Meng, a member of the New York State Assembly representing Flushing, Queens, is co-sponsoring the bill to ban shark fin in the state. As a Chinese American, she grew up loving shark fin soup, and she doesn’t believe that the bill is culturally discriminatory.
“I have gotten a couple of not-so-friendly calls in the office saying that I don’t understand my own culture,” she said. Still, she told me, she has met people who are very supportive of the bill. “A lot of older people don’t really know how shark fin soup is made,” she said. “When they see it, they feel bad.”
The Biggest Port
Most of the people I talked to think that the bill being put forth in New York will pass. Once California’s shark fin ban is complete, New York will be the biggest port for the trade of shark fin in the United States. And closing the New York port could narrow the trade routes for shark fin between countries where fishing takes place—Spain and Portugal are big ones—and China.
“It’s very difficult to say if the New York ban will have a positive effect,” Chapman said. “Will it mean that fewer sharks are killed, or will fins end up somewhere else?”
If enough states push for a ban, there is a chance that shark fin imports could be banned federally.
“There are a lot of sensitivities,” Eilperin said, “but at the end of the day, science and facts should be driving public policy, and that’s important to keep in mind when people make these cut and dry statements when thinking about it.”
The Taste Of Shark
When the waiter at the Golden Unicorn brought me my dish—the braised shark’s fin soup supreme—he placed it carefully before me, removed the plate covering the bowl, and stood ceremoniously to my side before walking away.
The broth was coated with a thick, oily film, but when I dipped my spoon into the bowl to stir up the contents, it thinned out. There is not much, though, to report about the meal itself. As I had read, the fin, prepared in noodle-like strips, was tasteless and had a rubbery texture. The broth, mild in flavor, recalled chicken stock.
It must be concluded that the soup, as Juliet Eilperin writes in Demon Fish, is “all symbol, no substance,” surely not worth its gouged price.
What kind of shark I ate is a mystery; I’ve been told that the only way to find out is through DNA testing.
And seeing the filaments of an anonymous shark fin floating limply, uselessly, in yellow-brown broth, tamed by the proportions of a porcelain bowl, eating the meat of an animal I have always feared but know so little about, did not feel right.
I have only seen one shark in the wild, and the memory humbles me. I was nine or ten, with my family on an island in the Outer Banks. It appeared out of the waves before us as we stood on the shore: a blacktip, we think. I’m told the whole body was visible, but I only remember catching the dorsal and caudal fins slicing imperiously through the water before they slipped below the surface. A flash of grey and the shark was gone.
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