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Despite having a high mercury content and being harvested in a way considered cruel by animal groups, shark fin is popularly used in a Chinese soup consumed for birthdays, weddings, and other special occasions. Now, it’s officially banned in California.
Shark fin soup is a Chinese delicacy; walk into certain restaurants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and you’re guaranteed to find it–but not for much longer. Last week, California governor Jerry Brown signed a law banning the sale of shark fins. It’s a move that is being celebrated by environmentalists, but some Chinese Americans are complaining that the law is an attack on their culture.
The process of shark finning is brutal, to say the least–fisherman catch sharks, slice off their tails and fins, and toss the sharks back into the water, where they quickly die. The practice has caused shark populations in some areas to drop by up to 90%. It’s especially prevalent in California, where 85% of U.S. shark fin consumption occurs. And when sharks die, it disrupts entire ocean ecosystems. Sharks are one of the top predators controlling fish populations, so when they’re gone, there is an out of whack relationship between fish and plankton.
“We applaud Governor Brown for signing AB 376,” writes Bill Wong, a member of the Asian Pacific American Ocean Harmony Alliance and creator of a petition on Change.org that helped lead the charge for the law. “It puts California at the forefront of the global effort to save sharks led by a broad coalition of Asian Pacific Americans, conservationists, animal rights activists, commercial fishermen, business leaders and artists. The passage of this bill may just be the tipping point that will preserve the shark species and the ocean ecosystem.” We contacted Wong for further comment, but have yet to hear back.
California’s new law may be one of the last chances to save sharks, but it’s provoking ire from Chinese American restaurant and shop owners, who claim that the ban will put a big dent in their business. Dried shark fin sells for over $2,000 a pound, and it’s considered both a status symbol and a way to celebrate big occasions. One Chinese restauranteur tells the L.A. Times that his main business is dishing out shark fin soup, and that everything else is secondary. He is closing his restaurant at the end of the year.
by Michael Reidy
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom
America’s taste for bean soup appears to be unrelenting, and the World Wide Web offers more than a quarter of a million references to the subject. Multiple-bean soups are particularly in vogue. A methodical check on a leading search engine produced the following results which I record here for future historians of early twenty-first century food. Unexpectedly, this research also thrown up food for thought for mathematicians.
The methodology for researching multiple-bean soup was thus: The phrase “2 bean soup” was entered into the search engine, and the result recorded. Next, the phase “two bean soup” was entered. The search term producing the largest number was recorded as the most accurate number. This method was repeated until the number of beans in soup failed to produce relevant returns, thus, “Page 34, beans are the flavor of the month for soup…” was not considered a valid return for ‘34 bean soup.’
The chart (see Figure 2) plots the number of pages returned for each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23. No soups were found using in excess of 23 varieties of bean.
Figure 2. A graph of the data. This depicts the number of World Wide Web pages the author found that pertain to each number of varieties of bean in soups for bean quantities ranging from 2 to 23.
Taking the pulse of bean soup is less straight forward than originally supposed. I had reckoned to encounter a normal bell curve with a peak around 16 beans, as the diversity of recipes for bean soup would at first sight seem to be a random event.
more …
A stray 4-month-old kitten in Louisville, Kentucky, helped himself to the remnants of a discarded can of soup and got his head wedged tight inside the can.
The kitten was brought in by MAS animal control officer Raymond Thomas on Monday, and was immediately taken to the veterinary staff, Gulbe said.
An initial attempt was made by veterinary assistant Brenda Keel to remove the can, but the kitten started crying. He was sedated and a pair of bolt-cutters were used to cut the can off of his head.
Gulbe said the kitten was also hypothermic and received medical attention to stabilize his condition.
Staff named the kitten “Campbell.”
Campbell, who cleaned up well, is now up for adoption. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: Metro Animal Services)
You’d think soup would completely dry up after a couple of thousand years, but a pot of still-liquid soup was found by a team of archaeologists in China. It was sealed inside a bronze cooking pot at a dig near Xian.
The soup and bones were discovered in a small, sealed bronze vessel in a tomb being excavated to make way for the extension of the airport in Xian, home to the country’s famed ancient terracotta warriors, the report said.
The liquid and bones in the vessel had turned green due to the oxidation of the bronze, it said. Scientists were expected to conduct further tests to confirm the liquid was indeed soup and to identify the ingredients.
Another liquid discovery at the same site is believed to be wine. Link -via Fortean Times
(Image credit: Xinhua)
If you think about it, table manners are just one of the ways The Man has got us under his thumb. Separate forks for salad, fish, oyster and dinner? It’s oppression, I tell you.
Our BFF BuzzFeed is revolting against some of the stupidest table manners today and have provided means for us regular Joes to resist being civilized:
1. Multiple Forks
Oppressive rule: You sit down at a fancy restaurant and are immediately faced with a vast array of forks.Resistance solution: Side-step the utensils. God gave you hands for a reason.
2. Eating Soup With A Spoon
Oppressive rule: Despite the fact that soup is a liquid, we’re forced to ladle in out in painfully small increments, always with the threat of spillage.Resistance solution: Use a straw if it’s thin broth; lift the bowl and DRINK DIRECTLY FROM THE BOWL if it’s anything hearty.
Miss Manners is surely horrified: Link – Thanks Matt!
David William of And I Am Not Lying For Real blog was having a nice lunch when a hawk flew into where he was eating and landed on his food:
I was sitting at a window seat next to the open door, and my food had just been brought out. I looked down to see this guy (or gal – I don’t know hawks) just standing in the doorway, looking back and forth. After surveying the place for a few seconds, it flapped its way in and up onto one of the empty tables. [...]
The hawk just sat there for a little while, getting jerk BBQ sauce all over its talons and looking all emo, until it was spooked by the restaurant’s delivery guy walking in, whereupon it shot past all of us into the kitchen.
The counter guy, the delivery guy and I heard a few pots clanging as we debated calling animal control versus just trying to shoo it back out the door, when one of the cooks who was back there caught the hawk with his bare hands, and walked it back outside.“What restaurant was this?”
I am so glad that you asked.
The place is called, I kid you not… “BIRDIE’S”.
Just how do sumo wrestlers bulk up for their sport? Turns out, it’s by eating soup!
Here’s a neat article by Tania Kadokura of Saveur magazine about chanko-nabe, a hearty, protein-rich one-pot meal that has been the staple of sumo warriors for over a century:
Today’s wrestlers train and live at heya (stables) run by former sumo champions, where everything from their grooming to their diet is carefully controlled. Because strength and size are factors key to success in sumo, what and how much a wrestler eats are of particular importance. No wonder, then, that the staple dish of the sumo world is a hearty, filling one-pot meal, consisting of broth, vegetables, and meat or seafood, called nabemono, or nabe for short. (Nabe, pronounced nah-bay, means pot; nabemono means things in a pot.) The dish likely dates to the Jomons, who inhabited Japan a dozen millennia ago. The inventors of pottery, they were apparently the first people to cook food in pots.
When nabe is prepared by sumo wrestlers, it’s called chanko-nabe, a name whose origin is unclear – although since chan means father and ko means child, some believe the term refers to a stable , master and his apprentices. The tradition of sumo wrestlers’ eating nabe supposedly began in the early 1900s, when star wrestler ~ turned stable master Hitachiyama ~ (sumo wrestlers traditionally go by a single ring name) made a batch for his charges one day. He quickly realized that the meal ~ usually cooked over a gas burner set on the table with diners gathered around-was not only nutritious and inexpensive but also easy to prepare and eaten in a way that reinforced the communal aspect of the stable. It wasn’t long before other stable masters were serving chanko-nabe, too.
Link – via grow-a-brain
(Photo: Christopher Hirsheimer)
