A Strange Benefit of Lying

I think Gordon Ramsay is an interesting fellow. My mother loves watching his shows and I will sometimes watch them with her, especially his new travel show. He was in Asia helping a family with their business and one of the menu items was shark fin. He tried the dish and said it had no flavor. There was nothing spectacular about the dish. He asked why they serve it when some sharks, specifically the great white, are on the endangered species list. The answer was tradition and prestige. Basically the delicacy started as a dish only for royalty and is now a high priced item sold to the wealthy.

Sharks need a dorsal fin to live. The fact that a dish involving an endangered animal that has no flavor is even worse. That tradition is so powerful it demands a lack of integrity.

I'd much rather a dish involve a mineral, say gold. There is at least a return on investment later on.

From an economics stand-point I don't see the need to use shark fin when the dish has no distinction. Chicken or even tofu could be used in its place. Sure, you'd be lying, but you'd pocket more money in the long run and an endangered animal gets a little longer to live.

Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando were in a film called The Freshman . In it an endangered (I believe last of its kind) animal is going to be served to the rich. *SPOILER ALERT* In the end it turns out the animal is sent to a refuge and the rich are served a gourmet dish of chicken. The point is there was no way to know how the meat tastes so they could have been fed nearly anything, but the value was based on what they thought they were eating. Side note: people tend to value higher food they spend more money on, so these dinner guests would fool themselves into thinking the dinner was amazing.

Something that wasn't in the movie, but I thought about later was something of a prisoner's dilemma. The dinner guests wouldn't be able to talk about the dinner except with other guests because it was illegal.

I wouldn't put it past someone to think Canned Unicorn Meat is really made of unicorns, but since unicorns don't exist is it really a crime to tell someone they're eating shark fin soup when it's really catfish?