Fuchsia Dunlop

‘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.