(Please see Read This, side margin. I highly recommend the book, and was happy to hear recently my youngest son has started into it).
Throughout, a ‘live small’ philosophy is encouraged, based on Safina’s first-hand observations of some of mankind’s insatiable appetites.
An earlier post, Live Small Pt 2, mentioned events on the East Coast of Canada. Now we travel to another East Coast, simultaneously so different and so much the same.
“Hong Kong is a modern metropolis of six million bust souls, a comfortable, clean, safe, hustling city, with dense morning mists, workers on bamboo lattices building skyscrapers, and businesses and products with names like Very Good Trading Company and Double Happiness Cigarettes.” (pg. 404, song for the blue ocean)
And everywhere, shops.
“Ah! The place we have been looking for. Baskets and tubs of live frogs, turtles, salamanders, and aquarium plants clutter the sidewalks. Shop after shop (many selling cyanide-caught fish that die immediately after eating their first large meal because their innards have been severely damaged by the poison) of live aquarium fishes line the street.”
The following sign caught Safina’s eye:
“We import all kinds raw shark fins, make all kinds shark fin products, selling shark fins, shark fin fiber.”
[“Shark fin soup - a high price in many ways”: PHOTO LINK]
As you’ll soon see, the Chinese use shark fins in much the same way my mother used oatmeal. The same way, but very different again too.
“In the backs of many shops here, workers are drying and skinning the fins, then soaking them to get the fibers used in making soup. (A bowl of shark fin soup can cost $90.)”
“I pick up a package of shark fin fibers packed in cellophane, and in the directions on the back the secret of making shark fin soup is revealed to me for the first time:
Cook two hours with ham or chicken, in chicken broth.
“I stare at this for a few moments and read it twice. I can’t get over this! We are demolishing sharks worldwide to make ham-flavored chicken soup? I had heard that the fins add texture but no flavor. Apparently, this is true.
(My mother tossed a handful of oatmeal into her meatloaf - not for texture - in order to make it go farther.)
“In my own wasteful throwaway society, we do not appreciate the real value of so many things. Here, so many things are wasted because they are valued in ways that are not real.
“In every restaurant we’ve been to in Hong Kong, various soups featuring shark fins are an entire section in the menu. Just as buffalo tongues, passenger pigeons, and cranes once graced the menus of fancy restaurants in America.” (pg. 403)
Gone are the days of the five-foot-long cod fish on Canada’s East Coast.
Hopefully, soon, gone will be the days of slashing shark fins off the back of a shark (only to dispose of the rest, in many cases, in the ocean) to add texture to chicken soup.
Soon?
More to follow.
***
Please click here to read Live Small PT 2: Mistakes charge compound interest.
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