The roiling rhetoric that has washed over San Francisco since two California assemblymen introduced a bill banning the statewide sale and import of shark's fin has left many people in the city sputtering. AB-376 has brought out a host of accusations of animal cruelty, ecological devastation, and racism.
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Most of the articles covering the horrific practice of shark-finning the bill is trying to prevent — in which fishing boats capture live sharks by the thousand, slice off their fins, then throw them back in the water to die — report that shark's fin is flavorless and chewy, which leaves many Westerners puzzled as well as traumatized. But there's a reason it is ubiquitous in Chinese wedding banquets and New Year's dinners: The pleasure one takes in eating shark's fin, like other delicacies such as sea cucumber, fish maw, and jellyfish, is in savoring its texture. To discuss only the flavors within a Chinese dish is like trying to sculpt something in 2-D.
The controversy is so compelling, and the bewilderment of many of my non-Chinese friends so complete, that it brought me to Great Eastern, one of Chinatown's best-known seafood restaurants, to eat something I have avoided for many years and hope to avoid for many more: a bowl of shark's fin and crab soup.
At Great Eastern, the soup can be ordered by the individual portion, though each costs $32. When I received my half-pint bowl, I could see tufts of crabmeat floating below the surface of a thick, clear brown broth, which seemed to have ripples frozen within it. When I raised up a spoonful to look, the ripples revealed themselves to be hundreds of delicately arced, transparent threads of cartilage, each the size of a pine needle.
Despite its price, the soup was no culinary masterpiece. The pork-and-chicken broth lacked complexity and depth, if not cornstarch. But the shark's fin was exquisite: Each filament was silky and jellied, but with a delicately chewy texture. As I sipped the soup, the filaments fluttered against every surface of my mouth, impossible to pinpoint, like walking through the mist halo of a sprinkler and trying to identify where each drop lands on your skin.
"Shark's fin takes an enormous amount of work to prepare," says Cecilia Chiang, at 92 still one of the country's most respected Chinese-American restaurateurs. When she ran the Mandarin, her San Francisco restaurant, she used to fly to Japan to carry back top-quality ingredients to serve as Shanghainese-style red-cooked shark's fin. The cooking process, she recounts, took more than a week. "You have to soak the shark's fin for five days to soften it, changing the water every day," she says. "Then you wrap it in pork caul fat and steam it for two days. If you steam it too long, the shark's fin turns to jelly, so you have to steam it for a while, let it cool, then steam it again. It takes a lot of skill to get the texture right." Cantonese shark's fin soup follows much the same procedure as the red-cooked version: a long soak, followed by several days of cooking, and finally a simmer in a flavorful stock that itself has taken days to prepare.
The reputation of shark's fin as a luxury ingredient dates back to the days when catching a live shark was an arduous experience, and its cartilage was a rare presence on the tables of the elite. Now, thanks in part to exploding demand, dried shark's fin, which can cost hundreds of dollars per pound, has become a lucrative trade. The Save Our Seas Foundation estimates that between 26 and 73 million sharks are finned every year — all over the world, including U.S. waters — and dozens of species are now on the verge of collapse. More than 90 percent of shark's fins caught are destined for China and Hong Kong, but American activists say that California is the second largest market in the country. What we do here has a small impact, but one that may well resonate across the ocean.
The many national anti-shark-finning laws that have been passed around the world, including the federal Shark Conservation Act that President Barack Obama signed into law on Jan. 4, are filled with loopholes and have had little effect on international trade. Assemblymen Paul Fong and Jared Huffman's bill, which resembles a Hawaii state law passed in April 2010, basically argues that since we can't control supply, we have to cut off demand.
That approach, state Sen. Leland Yee argued in response to AB-376, constituted an "unfair attack on Asian culture and cuisine." (He has since pulled back on his stance, arguing instead that a blanket ban outlaws fins from sharks caught for their meat or species whose status is not endangered.) Yee's comment has infuriated many Chinese-Americans who see no discrepancy between cultural heritage and environmental conservation.
One of them is Slanted Door owner Charles Phan, whose heritage is Vietnamese Chinese. The sponsors of the bill recruited Phan to join them at the initial press conference. Phan says that before the event, several chefs from prominent Cantonese restaurants called him, asking him not to appear. Why were they worried? "Because they didn't want to stop selling shark's fin," he says; it's unclear whether they were motivated by cultural or financial terms. Since the press conference, Phan says the response he has received from people in the industry has been 20-to-one positive. Yet when I asked him if he could point me to a local chef who'd given up serving shark's fin soup, he couldn't identify anyone, and I haven't found one yet.
