I admit that I like shark-fin soup. It’s not that I get to eat it very often though, in fact only very rarely, like at weddings, major family gatherings, and so forth. Over the years, I may have even included it in one or two (or even 4!) of the dinners that I had given or presided over. But that was in the past, albeit only the recent past and at that time when one talked about sharks “Jaws” came to mind. Who wants to save sharks? Why protect them? Who would believe that the millions of sharks in the ocean could be decimated? They are ferocious beasts that can take care of themselves!
Anyway sharkfin is so expensive - how many people can afford to eat it? Exactly! It’s mostly the Overseas Chinese who ate sharkfin but only a small percentage of them could have yee-chi tong regularly in those days not so long ago! Now with the billion-plus population of Chinese in the Mainland so much more economically enpowered almost every Chinese family wants and can afford to have this delicacy on the menu at every wedding, birthday, New Year, get-together, and business dinners. They can even have sharkfin-filled dimsums for Sunday brunch! It’s a status thing!
Not that it is so delicious that the ingenious Chinese cannot find or make a substitute for it, there are already faux sharkfin on the market! But nobody wants “fake” they want the real fins chopped right off the swimming fish!
That makes it different now! Sharks simply can’t reproduce fast enough to keep up with the demand! Sooner rather than later they will become extinct, they are already on the way now!
Anyway sharkfin is so expensive - how many people can afford to eat it? Exactly! It’s mostly the Overseas Chinese who ate sharkfin but only a small percentage of them could have yee-chi tong regularly in those days not so long ago! Now with the billion-plus population of Chinese in the Mainland so much more economically enpowered almost every Chinese family wants and can afford to have this delicacy on the menu at every wedding, birthday, New Year, get-together, and business dinners. They can even have sharkfin-filled dimsums for Sunday brunch! It’s a status thing!
Not that it is so delicious that the ingenious Chinese cannot find or make a substitute for it, there are already faux sharkfin on the market! But nobody wants “fake” they want the real fins chopped right off the swimming fish!
That makes it different now! Sharks simply can’t reproduce fast enough to keep up with the demand! Sooner rather than later they will become extinct, they are already on the way now!
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