Anti-Shark Fin Soup Efforts Intensifying in Asia

It's tasteless in more ways than one, opponents of the soup say

More auspicious than delicious, shark fin is rubbery in both taste and texture. While its flavor is muted, a bowl of shark fin soup says plenty in traditional Chinese culture: The hosts have money and they're generous enough to spread it around.

But in Asia, the soup's culinary home turf, the dish is increasingly regarded as, well, tasteless. Anti-finning advocates, armed with gruesome facts about threatened shark species, are attacking shark fin's reputation as a status-boosting delicacy. Their mission: to see the culinary tradition die off before the sharks do.