Don’t eat endangered animals this Chinese New Year

Give shark’s fin a miss — you’re really eat­ing chicken stock and car­ti­lage any­way. Don’t lis­ten to peo­ple who say all those sto­ries about fish­er­men cru­elly slic­ing off fins and dump­ing the shark back in the sea are false. You tell me, what do they really do with the rest of the shark? (OK, fish and chips, fish fin­gers, cat food… yes, I looked it up. But still!?)

I’m not sure what else we eat dur­ing Chi­nese New Year that are on the pro­tected list, but please pause and pon­der, because even if we Chi­nese are not the only eth­nic group that thinks along the lines of “the more endan­gered it is, the more prized the del­i­cacy”, we cer­tainly are the largest eth­nic group on the planet.

There’s a Face­book Group called Project:FIN and it aims to stop the con­sump­tion of sharks’ fin by debunk­ing and ques­tion­ing the very rea­sons we con­sume it. E.g.:

It is ques­tion­able why we are pay­ing so much for a “del­i­cacy” that we don’t even know what it actu­ally taste like. Sim­ply because the fins are taste­less. What we are actu­ally enjoy­ing, is the taste of chicken / pork stock, along­side other ingre­di­ents that gives fla­vor to the dish. And to think that the insis­tence of buy­ing taste­less food and pay­ing for them at ridicu­lous prices, is a mock­ery on its own.

Join it, spread the word, and help fin­ish the fin trade!