Writer has dished up a morass of non-sequiturs
SUMIKO Tan’s article “You are what you eat” ( Sunday Star, Feb 12), an apologia for eating sharks’ fin soup, starts with a cliche and then becomes a morass of non-sequiturs.
Here are a few responses to the points she tries to make.
First, she states directly that the fins are tasteless. Not much gastronomic justification, then, although she later writes that the soup itself is tasty.
She states that shark’s fin soup was for centuries served as a treat, which may be true, but given the increasing prosperity of consumers, it can hardly be considered a rare delicacy any more. Hence the explosion of shark fishing and finning.
Ah yes, finning. Tan allows that “they say” that sharks are “sometimes” thrown back into the sea to sink and die, and that this has dire effects on the ocean’s ecosystem. There is no “they say” about it. There is plenty of documentary evidence available.
Having admitted this, she at once moves on to the statement that not eating a proffered bowl of soup would be a sheer waste of money and bad manners. Where is the priority here? Someone’s money, hurt feelings, or the environment?
She states later that bluefin tuna are becoming endangered because of over-fishing, which presumably is a bad thing. How can she square this with her admission that the world’s shark population is being depleted?
Now to the argument that compassionate eaters don’t eat factory-farmed animals. Ignoring her casual and well-worn series of rhetorical questions, we arrive at this one: “Isn’t ‘humanely’ killed a contradiction?”
No, it isn’t. Humanely killing means killing dead as fast as possible. Throwing mutilated sharks back into the water to die slowly is not the same as stunning a piglet before slitting its throat and, if one wishes, roasting and eating it.
She writes that animals were created to be killed by humans for food. Has she never heard of evolution? And which is more cruel, to humanely kill domesticated animals that have never known the freedom of the wild, or snatch a free animal from its environment, mutilate it, and then throw it back?
However, the notion that humans can be cruel seems to be absent from her world view. Animals in the wild, she writes, rip apart and kill each other all the time.
No, they do not. Check out “herbivore” in a dictionary. And very few animals mutilate others and leave them to die. Only humans do that on a regular basis.
Finally, she uses the familiar canard that we are ultimately what we eat, and we live with our conscience. Judging by this article, a conscience that most people would consider human is precisely what she lacks.