Fuchsia Dunlop

Last night I went to a press screening of Food Inc, Robert Kenner’s film about the corporate takeover of the American (and global) agricultural and food industries. For anyone who has read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma,  or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, many of the issues, and even the characters, will be familiar - Pollan and Schlosser both appear in the film - but that doesn’t make it any less chilling. Most shocking was its account of the bullying tactics used by big agro-food corporations to silence their critics, and of the cosy relationship they have with those in power. Continue reading…

You can hear me talking about eating shark’s fin (or not) on the BBC today (or read the piece here).

While I was writing it, I came across a page I tore out of the South China Morning Post in October last year. It includes a letter from Dr Choo-hoo Giam, a member of the animals committee of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. What is particularly interesting about the letter is that Dr Giam points out the extent to which it is not only the Chinese and their notorious shark’s fin soup that are to blame for the devastation of worldwide shark stocks. The main points Dr Giam makes are as follows: Continue reading…

Slow-cooked bear paw with duck wings - image from an old Chinese cookery book

The Chinese penchant for eating endangered species is in the news again. Today the BBC ran a report by Moscow correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes about the poaching of Asiatic black bears in northeastern Russia. The culprits? Suppliers of bear’s paws and gall bladders to China, where the paws are an ancient delicacy, and the gall is prized for its medicinal properties. And last week, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that a man in Yunnan Province had been jailed for 12 years for killing, and then eating, a rare and endangered Indochinese tiger (in this case, the man at least claimed that it had been shot accidentally, after dark.)

Bear’s paw is one rare Chinese delicacy that I have never been offered, thank goodness. If in the future I do see one on a dinner table, rest assured that I will restrain my curiosity and refuse it. And yet I can’t help wondering if eating such things, gross and unconscionable though it may be, is any worse than driving a car, travelling by plane, using consumer goods whose manufacture and disposal causes catastrophic pollution, or eating a lot of factory-farmed meat. It’s much easier to make a moral point by refusing bear’s paw (particularly if it’s not part of your own culture) than it is to address seriously the impact of our consumerist lifestyles on the planet and its biodiversity, isn’t it?

Camellia oil, hot off the press

There’s an article of mine in the Financial Times Weekend today, about the dilemmas facing China’s artisanal food producers.

The picture on the right was taken at the camellia oil press described in the article, just after I’d tasted the oil.

As the Copenhagen summit goes on, deciding all our futures, I’ve been thinking about what it takes to motivate democratically-elected leaders to take steps that may bring what seems like immediate hardship, in order to avert longer-term disaster. Continue reading…

My friend Andrea, cooking supper for a group of us at his home, mentioned that a mutual friend hadn’t been able to join us because he was at the ‘fish extinction awards, otherwise known as the sushi awards’. And so we got talking about the perilous state of bluefin tuna stocks (this magnificent fish is almost certain to be extinct within three years - just watch The End of the Line to see why). Continue reading…

‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’ has been chosen as the first book featured by the international ex-pat wing of the Daily Telegraph’s website. This is great, except that the discussion so far has been hijacked by people who haven’t read the book, but accuse me of promoting the consumption of shark’s fin!

If they did read the book, of course, they’d discover that there’s a whole chapter about the damage caused by the consumption of bits of endangered species, including shark’s fin.

It’s very weird - the very mention of shark’s fin seems to be a kind of trigger for outrage. This has happened to me before online, and I do wonder if some people do a kind of websearch for the term ’shark’s fin’, and then automatically post furious messages, without troubling themselves to find out what is actually being said.

Hmm.

A new report says that many shark species are facing extinction, mainly because of overfishing. It’s not just the Chinese love of shark’s fin soup that is to blame:  they are also killed as ‘bycatch’ when caught accidentally in nets intended for tuna and swordfish. But the fin trade is an important factor.

Only last week I watched Rupert Murray’s chilling new film about overfishing, the End of the Line. (It’s based on Charles Clover’s investigative book of the same name.) This should be essential viewing for anyone who considers themselves concerned about the state of the environment, and indeed the world. Might it actually be a tipping point in persuading governments, particularly those of Japan and the European Union, to do something about the pillage of the world’s oceans?

According to this report in the Guardian, student groups in China are beginning to challenge the custom of eating endangered animals for their supposed health benefits. I remember when I was researching a piece on eating endangered species for the Financial Times a couple of years ago, I interviewed Jim Harkness of the WWF, and he told me he was hopeful that the younger generation would reject some of the more exotic delicacies favoured by their parents. I can’t say I’ve seen much evidence of this so far, but I was heartened to meet someone in Chengdu in March who said she no longer ate shark’s fin or wild animals for a mixture of health and environmental reasons (the health reasons were the high mercury content of shark, and the risk of disease from eating wild animals - as highlighted in the SARS crisis of 2003, when civet cats were fingered as a possible source of the virus).   

Anyway, let’s hope that these students in Guangzhou, which is, after all, the epicentre of Chinese trade in exotic animals, start to change opinions…

European Union ministers are demanding urgent action to protect sharks in European waters, because a third of shark species are endangered because of chronic overfishing.   It’s easy  to guess who the main culprits are - lovers of shark’s fin soup, most of them, I assume, Chinese. I’ve been avoiding shark’s fin on my trips to China for the last couple of years for environmental reasons. But I do sometimes wonder whether this is pure tokenism: I mean, almost all the fish and other seafood one eats nowadays is from threatened species, and if we carry on as we do now, there won’t be any left (have a look at this chilling article by Andrew Purvis in yesterday’s Observer Food Monthly). What’s the point of not eating shark’s fin a few times a year if I’m still eating oysters, cod and wild sea bass? Isn’t it just a silly sop to my conscience, a way of feeling good and pretending I’m doing the right thing, when I’m overexploiting the planet like everyone else? (I’ve always thought it ridiculous that people should object to the cruelty of fox-hunting when they eat factory farmed meat and cheap clothes made by child labour for similar reasons. )  On the other hand, I suppose one does have to start somewhere…