The Oriental Express: Let's Preserve Our Earth!

I asked Jason who operates Jason's Penang Cuisine at Amoy Street Food Centre for his recipe to cook shark's fin soup. He confimed what I have been suspecting all along. Shark's fin on its own is actually quite tasteless. It is the way it is cooked that makes it so tasty. The bulk of the taste comes from simmering the soup which is made with dried cuttle fish and in some cases, an addition of scallops.

Hence, my question now is, if shark's fin is tasteless, then why do we need to kill so many thousands of sharks for this delicacy? I am not against people eating what they want to eat. I am against the way the sharks are cruelly killed for their fins! Why can't people just eat up or use the whole shark, instead of just throwing it back into the ocean after its fins have been cut off? Can you imagine the excruciating pain of the poor creature? Try giving a small cut on your finger and then immersing it in a pot of very salty water! How much more acute is the pain of a shark mercilessly stripped of its fins, and then thrown into the vast sea of salty water!

I suggested to Jason that perhaps manufacturers can come up with some kind of imitation shark's fin. Make them from green bean powder like the way tang hoon is being made. Except that the manufacturers have to shape it like shark's fin, and to make it less permeable, so that it will not soak up the soup too much.

We Chinese are well known to be creative in cooking. As my Canadian friends had said, "You Chinese eat everything, almost everything under the sun!" Perhaps it was due to the extreme poverty in days of yore, that caused our ancestors to look out for edible things. However, now that we are more progressive and wealthy, let us perhaps revise our menu. Let us fight against the eating of monkeys' brains, dogs, cats, snakes, frogs and frog's legs, etc. Eating monkeys' brains does not make you more intelligent than you really are. Wisdom comes from above and from real life experiences. When you order a plate of frogs' legs, have you every wondered what happens to the rest of the frogs' bodies? Made into soup or discarded away?

At least for those who cannot resist including all these exoitic creatures in their diet, they should practise a more humane way of killing the poor creatures. I can never forget the program I saw on National Geographic. A Thai man gleefully slit the lower part of a huge snake, that was still alive. He then flexed his arms with a show of bravado. His partner, a beautiful lady, just smiled sweetly. The man should just go for viagra to improve his libido instead of drinking the blood of the snake. He caught the blood in his glass and drank it, with his tongue licking good! Makes me wonder who was the real devil.... the Thai man or the snake!!! How could anyone still savour a bowl of monkey's brain after having seen it killed in a very cruel way right on the dinner table? Jeanell, my friend laughed when I told her I lost weight each time I went to China. The reason? I avoid eating meat, just in case, I unknowingly eat dog's meat! Dogs are my favourite animals and I would rather die from starvation than to touch any dog's meat.