Why do people make such a big deal about shark fin soup, why not just make shark soup? Is there such a big difference between the fin and the rest of the shark?
In: 5
In Japanese traditional medicine it is said that shark fins are good for health and general health, but the fins are literally just cartilage, having no nutritional value, and being quite common nowadays being contaminated with heavy metals as mercury and lead. Shark meat isn’t tasty nor nutritional or even easy to catch.
That being said, the ruckus about shark fin/meat is unjustified, being held by the outdated beliefs of an ineffective medicine and the society around who refuses to change its ways
[removed]
Has anyone here actually eaten shark fin? It has to be sliced very thin, often like spaghetti as it it like chewing rubber bands. It has little taste and absolutely no nutritional value.
It is served mostly as a food to impress as it is very costly. All the flavor comes from the broth.
Sharks are full of urea. If you’ve ever been in the bath too long you’ve seen your fingers prune up. This is because being in a large body of water actually sucks out the water in your body. This process happens much quicker in salt water. To prevent this, sharks fill their muscles and blood with urea. This prevents the water from being sucked out of their bodies, but it also makes the flesh smell and taste like urine.
The only part of the shark that is even remotely appetizing is the fin. This part is almost all fat, which doesn’t need as much urea to prevent losing water. The fin doesn’t taste good either, it’s pretty tasteless, but it’s the only part that you can put in soup without ruining the dish.
IIRC it’s because they only cut off the fin then throw the shark back into the water to die. It’s killing an entire animal for this relatively small edible portion because the rest of it isn’t very marketable for reasons already explained as opposed to chickens or cows or pigs where the meat industry has found uses for most of the animal.
ETA: typos!
Sharks are large beasts, and are found far from land. This means that the largest cost for harvesting a shark is boat space. It’s just not worth the cost for most fishers to catch and sell entire sharks; they’d rather avoid them being in their nets at all.
Shark fins, now; those are a small fraction of the shark by mass, and are worth most of the money an entire shark would be worth. This means a random boat is financially incentivized to kill many times as many sharks if they can sell the fins and dump the rest. This leads to the overfishing of an often-endangered-predator, which is generally a bad thing.
Latest Answers