Tuna, And The People Who Will Get Rich When There Are No More.

October 25, 2022 1:46 PM

"The London restaurant menu at the time of writing includes a slimy little asterisk; ‘Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species – please ask your server for an alternative’: sashimi with a sauce of cognitive dissonance...(f)or many diners at Nobu, though, the asterisk is presumably not so much a deterrent as a victory flag: it’s their scarcity that makes eating them so visceral a thrill."

Tuna is the hors d'oeuvre, but the main course of this bittersweet, brilliant essay by Katherine Rundell is the booming speculation economy of endangered species in general, and those who would profit from fauna extinction.

Another example: "There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar. Already, progress is looking good for those who bet on obliteration: the narrow-striped South China tiger has not been seen in the wild since the 1980s; the Caspian tiger, which had the thickest, most luxuriant fur of all tiger subspecies, became extinct in the wild at the end of the twentieth century."

posted by mreleganza (23 comments total)

Ugh.

Eat the rich
posted by Windopaene at 1:54 PM on October 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

Eat the rich

Someone's probably already speculating to profit off of that
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:59 PM on October 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

Is it better to reduce your own consumption in the hope that others will do the same so the species may survive or is that too Pollyannaish and the smart thing to do is to eat them before they're gone?

I feel like the solution to the collectors is some kind of deadliest game thing where people hunt people with big collections of tiger bone wine and the like. Less eat the rich and more skin and display their heads on a wall the rich I guess.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:00 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

More practically I wonder if CITES has some provision to automatically cover animals once they become endangered or extinct. And maybe it needs to be revamped so that once something is extinct it can't be held privately anymore. Doesn't matter how beautiful it is or what the family connection is, it either has to be destroyed or put up in a museum.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:03 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

Someone's probably already speculating to profit off of that

You want me to cut you in?
posted by ominous_paws at 2:06 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

This kinda reminds me of the time when foie gras was about to be banned in California and my friend very specifically wanted to try it before she no longer had the option. She offered me a bite, but man, that did not look good and I declined.

I kind of want to roll my eyes at the restaurant that admits bluefin is endangered, but is offering it anyway. What are they doing, keeping a bunch in a tank and killing them when someone orders?
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:12 PM on October 25, 2022 [10 favorites]

There is an absolutely incredible sci-fi manga from a decade ago or so about the kid who eats the very last piece of tuna sushi, and his quest for absolution.
posted by phooky at 2:24 PM on October 25, 2022 [23 favorites]

Reminds me also of the short story The Ugly Chickens.
posted by credulous at 2:28 PM on October 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

That manga is WILD.
posted by corb at 2:58 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Someone's probably already speculating to profit off of that

You want me to cut you in?

No thanks, I've got my own knife and fork.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:01 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Eating one billionaire will do more to offset your carbon footprint than a lifetime of veganism.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:44 PM on October 25, 2022 [36 favorites]

Gods, I am so very tired.
posted by xedrik at 4:19 PM on October 25, 2022 [9 favorites]

That manga reads like a 40 page SMBC comic.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 4:50 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

The death spiral of "high demand --> species gets closer to extinction --> now it's rare and even more desirable " is also being experienced by Nepenthes plants, aka pitcher plants.

WIRED did a great deep dive on it. It's incredibly saddening.
posted by wandering zinnia at 5:05 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

As a timeline cleanser, read about how the owner of Mashiko sushi bar in Seattle went fully sustainable (they're even more popular now)
posted by credulous at 5:10 PM on October 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

When I was an engineering student, I worked one summer at an organization that manages an undersea network of sensors for ocean scientists.

One day the lead engineer pulled a card from his wallet that listed species of fish. Each species was highlighted in red (highly endangered), yellow (could go extinct), or green (unlikely to go extinct soon).

The engineer showed us all the red (endangered) fish that he had crossed out. Why were they crossed out? Well, he had been eating all the most endangered species and crossing them off his list, because he wanted to taste them while he still could.

It still boggles my mind that he thought he should share this with us.
posted by blisterpack at 5:22 PM on October 25, 2022 [15 favorites]

I ordered a pitcher plant and venus fly trap for my son earlier this year and it never even occurred to me that they might be endangered. Looks like the garden variety one I got is classified as Least Concern so it isn't endangered but it's a good reminder to me to check the provenance of plants before buying them.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:23 PM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a guide put out by some sort of environmental organization that labels fish green/yellow/red. My local grocery store started labeling their fish green/yellow/red and then stopped selling the red-labeled fish because once people knew, they stopped buying it entirely.
posted by aniola at 5:31 PM on October 25, 2022 [13 favorites]

Ugh.

Eat the rich

Alternatively, pickle them and store them somewhere until you can sell them to their future counterparts for profit.
posted by roolya_boolya at 5:41 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

Wow, what a depressing article

Humans off Earth now
posted by SystematicAbuse at 8:12 PM on October 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

The thing that gets me, with using sushi as the entrypoint to the topic and using tiger bone rice wine as examples, is not so much the east asian cuisine, but asian cuisine enjoyed/normalized by westerners. This facet sticks out because as an 80s kid in Asia in the boom years, I absolutely remembered eating shark's fin soup, the real one. This was normal, but it was also a time period when my bog standard food is exotic, and the racism that accompanies. Anyway, we only eat imitation fin nowadays, thanks to some incredibly effective regional and cultural public advocacy (i remember the many Hong Kong superstars who got onboard the campaigning). I can't help but think there's an element of western-facing social aspiration then in that as well ("surely we're not uncivilized to eat endangered animals!"; I mention Hong Kong specifically for a reason, relating to its British colony status), I wonder if it's so hard for bluefin tuna to be off the menu is that unlike sharks, the global (western-centred) elite has now a taste for it, and so would rather offer rationalizations and empathy-building pieces rather than get to the apparently horrible option of giving it up.
posted by cendawanita at 8:35 PM on October 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

high demand --> species gets closer to extinction --> now it's rare and even more desirable

It really seems to me like a large portion of our species, faced with this kind of prisoner's dilemma / marshmallow test, just grabs whatever is on the plate. Abundance is not the baseline state and we're primed by all kinds of influences to just grab whatever's on the plate because scarcity is a thing that exists.

Toilet paper gougers, video card flippers, endangered species eaters, illegal fishery depletion, rent-seeking in housing, water squabblers, a couple thousand years of colonization behavior... all this assholery seems to stem from the same flaw. We call it "greed' but that's just one side of the coin. Greed, selfishness, a willingness to fuck over everyone and everything to create or enforce hierarchies.

We're successful as a species because we appear to be capable of being the shittiest of the primates when it comes to resource acquisition and consumption.
posted by majick at 6:30 AM on October 26, 2022

80 percent of his income is from poaching Nepenthes and orchids; all of his business comes from Facebook.

from that wired article posted by wandering zinnia.
posted by zenon at 7:08 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]