NEW YORK, Aug 31 — In the narrow aisles of Golden Profit Trading, a store on Mott Street in Chinatown selling dried seafood and medicinal herbs, shelves are stocked with crates and glass jars full of ingredients not usually found outside this Manhattan neighborhood. It has dried squid, bird’s nest, abalone and, for the enhancement of energy and virility, sea cucumber.
Yet one ingredient that regularly sold for at least US$100 (RM420) a pound is missing from the shelves, and has been missing for more than a year: shark fin.
In July 2014, New York state banned the possession, sale and distribution of shark fins, the key ingredient of shark fin soup, which is often served at traditional Chinese wedding banquets as a status symbol.
Under the law, only fins from non-endangered shark species (spiny dogfish and smooth dogfish), lawfully caught by a licensed commercial fisherman, are exempt from the ban.
An estimated 73 million sharks are caught each year for their fins, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, with most of them thrown back into open waters to die. This month the conservation agency announced the first successful prosecution under the law, when Long Quan Seafood International Trading Corp in Brooklyn pleaded guilty to felony commercialisation of wildlife and paid a US$10,000 fine for trafficking in shark fins. Officials seized more than 700 pounds of shark fins.
Iris Ho, wildlife programme manager for Humane Society International, spoke of the significance of the case.
“This prosecution should serve as an effective deterrent for other seafood trading companies in New York and other states, as well as restaurants who could be sourcing illegal shark fins,” Ho said.
Despite this one case, a year into the ban, very few consumers or restaurants seem to have been much affected. Indeed, many Chinese customers, restaurateurs and dried-seafood vendors have adapted and even happily embraced alternatives to shark fin soup.
“I think that sea cucumber has a good future,” said Simon Wan, manager of the Jade Asian Restaurant in Flushing, Queens.
As a substitute for shark fin soup at weddings and other formal gatherings, Jade Asian has turned to serving sea cucumber, which is not a vegetable but an ocean-dwelling animal with a long, gelatinous body shaped like a soft-bodied cucumber, which shrinks to a ridged form when dried.
Wan touted the sea cucumber as a nutritious source of energy and virility — and it is less expensive than shark fin, he pointed out, in part because it is easier to fish for and takes less time to prepare. Sea cucumber is soaked for two to three days, while shark fin requires about four days of preparation.
Across the street in Flushing at Mulan Modern Asian Cuisine, George Chu, the restaurant’s executive chef, said bird’s nest soup had replaced shark fin soup for their special-event dinners. In Hong Kong, bird’s nest soup has usually been seen as more of a dessert soup, Chu said. To elevate it to the status of shark fin soup, his kitchen combines bird’s nest — which is crystallised bird saliva from a sparrow — with seafood soup stock.
Chu added that there was a more immediate benefit to using this alternative: not having to withstand the fishy stench of the shark fin in his kitchen.
“I don’t think shark fins taste good, anyway,” he said.
That is not to say that full acceptance of shark fin soup alternatives happened overnight.
For one chef at a Chinese seafood restaurant on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who did not want to be named because he did not wish to publicly challenge the ban, only shark fin soup will do.
“This is really and truly a very Chinese tradition,” he said. “Without it, the party is a low-grade experience.”
Manfai Ngai, 78, a retired doctor who would routinely pick up a few ounces of dried shark fin cartilage from one of several shops along Main Street in Flushing, has rejected alternatives like imitation shark fin, which in some locations can be bought for US$35 a pack.
“Now they have this artificial kind made from mung bean,” Ngai said while walking along a stretch of stores not far from where he used to buy shark fin. “For myself, I don’t much like it.”
According to Peter How, president of the Asian American Restaurant Association, predictions of outraged parents of newlyweds expected to treat wedding guests to shark fin soup were overblown.
If anything, How said, families have been happy to consider alternatives that carry the same degree of elegance at a lower price.
“Now they don’t bring it up,” How said, referring to customers’ previous desire for shark fin.
La He, who works at Golden Profit in Chinatown, said shark fin was not missed as a sale item.
“It never sold well anyway,” she said this month as she dealt with a customer trying to negotiate the price of a box of bird’s nest.
As He and other Chinatown seafood vendors noted, shark fin was a hard sell for ordinary customers, given its high price.
Though some stores did see a loss.
To get rid of stock before the ban took effect, Xie Luomin, manager of the Po Wing Hong Food Market in Chinatown, said it sold off its shark fins at discounted prices to restaurants in New Jersey, where the shark fin trade is still legal. At the Hong Kong Supermarket in East Brunswick, New Jersey, a large yellow sign hanging from the ceiling directed shoppers to a corner of the store where shark fin and other premium products were dispensed from jars behind a counter. — The New York Times
