Shark fin restos are no-nos

It was nice to see The Jakarta Post highlighting Jakarta's lively dim sum culture through the "Chef serves up 60 varieties of dim sum" article that appeared on page 19 of your July 9 edition, under the page tag "In Good Taste." However, perhaps your newspaper and reporter showed extreme bad taste in giving publicity to a restaurant that serves shark fins.

I'm confident many other readers will share my distaste for such eating establishments. After all, any educated person would, or should, know:

* Sharks play a key role in our ocean environment, but they reach maturity and reproduce slowly, and cannot sustain overly aggressive finning and fishing activities by humans.

* Sharks are also main draws in many scuba diving areas. They provide great economic benefits to the people who live in such regions (including many within Indonesia) and make their living by serving the local scuba tourism industry. Killing them amounts to robbing those people of their living.

* Shark fin hunters cut fins off live sharks and then dump them to die slowly and rot on the sea bed. It is hard to think of a more barbaric or morally irresponsible act than that.

A number of restaurants in Jakarta offer delicious dim sum, but do not serve shark fins, precisely because they have become aware of the problems associated with shark finning. These deserve more publicity for displaying a more conscientious approach to the environment that we all share, while satisfying our taste buds.

ROBERT GO, Jakarta