Californian legislators have recently introduced a bill to ban the sale and possession of shark's fin. This is similar to a measure passed last year in Hawaii where restaurants have until June 30 to finish up their shark's fin inventories or be fined US$5,000 to $15,000 for a first offense.

Hong Kong is at the center of the billion dollar shark's fin industry, handling up to 80 percent of the world trade. Fins come in mainly from Europe, with Spain being the largest supplier by far.

An estimated 73 million sharks are killed each year for their fins, a prized culinary item for Chinese communities around the world. The trend of killing threatens the very existence of the species, potentially creating a domino effect in the ecosystem.

Despite the global nature of the shark's fin trade, some of California's Chinese community see the proposed ban on shark's fin as a direct attack on their culture, or as the New York Times calls it, "a sort of Chinese Exclusion Act in a bowl."

"Right now, Costco sells shark steak. What are you going to do with the fin from that shark?" said State Senator Leland Yee to the San Francisco Chronicle. Yee is running for mayor of San Francisco.

"This is another example in a long line of examples of insensitivity to the culture and traditions of the Asian American community."

Ironically, the bill was co-sponsored by an Asian-American Assemblyman: Paul Fong, a Silicon Valley Democrat. Fong speaks Cantonese and grew up eating shark's fin. But after he found out about the environmental damage that the finning industry has caused, he quit the dish, and now he wants everyone to follow.

In Fong's corner is science. Conservationists say sharks are amongst the most vulnerable species in the ocean today. As many as 90 percent of sharks in the world have disappeared due to overfishing. The population does not recover fast and farming is nearly impossible as sharks take a decade to mature.

Yet still, Chinese restaurateurs and diners cannot see why sharks have been put on a pedestal when the situation is comparable with the consumption of other fish -- fish that are not culturally specific to them.

"While we're at it, I'd also ban Caspian caviar and bluefin tuna until their fisheries recover. No doubt, that would raise an uproar in certain other cultural communities," Chinese-American chef Jonathan Wu said to the Times.

The vehement reaction from the Chinese community might be an instinctual detection of something more base than foul race-relations. Maybe they just caught a funky whiff of political BS. As Francis Lam articulates on Salon.com:

Anti-shark finning poster for Green Sense, more at www.greensense.org.hk."It's not that this ban is 'racist' as some have put it, it's that it's the kind of thing that smells a bit of cynical political posturing, scoring cheap environmental points because no politician is going to lose any votes that matter.

"Get rid of a grody-sounding food that only the Chinese are stupid enough to save up their money for? Easy! Try to take away the endangered tuna from voters' Friday night sushi date, though, and there'll be hell to pay.

"And don't even think about doing anything about factory farming, the cheap-meat industry that is unequivocally ruining huge swaths of our ecology and our health. It's not a good state of affairs when we can easily get up a head of steam behind laws that take away others' pleasures, but refuse to even take a hard look at our own."

Do you think that shark's fin should be banned? What other food issues need to be addressed internationally?