Eating the Wild

~ editorial, The New York Times, 1/25/09

" In America, there are foragers among us, out searching for morels in the spring, and there are hunters too. Yet most of our food, except for fish caught from the sea, is farmed. We do not trap songbirds for savory pies. (We destroy too many of them through other means.)

Once you look beyond the parochial culinary habits of most Americans you discover that wildness, and the tastes associated with it, have a talismanic power that is very hard to eradicate. It is what keeps the Japanese whaling (and, apparently planning to flout a U.N. ban on trade in bluefin tuna) and keeps some Africans eating bush meat. And it is one of the things that help explain the voracious and utterly destructive Chinese appetite for turtles.

As global wealth rises, so does global consumption of meat, which includes wild meat. Turtle meat used to be a rare delicacy in the Asian diet, but no longer. China, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, has vacuumed the wild turtles out of most of Southeast Asia. Now, according to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, they are consuming common soft-shell turtles from the American Southeast, especially Florida, at an alarming rate.

Some scientists estimate that two-thirds of the tortoise and freshwater turtle species on the planet are seriously threatened. Some of that is secondhand damage -- loss of habitat, water pollution, climate change. But far too many turtles are being lost to the fork and the spoon.

In the United States, the solution is relatively straightforward. States should impose much tighter restrictions on the harvesting and export of wild turtles. Internationally, the problem is more complicated. There have been efforts to monitor the species of wild turtles found in Chinese markets, but as long as the appetite for turtles -- and traditional medicines derived from them -- persists, we fear it will be hard to curtail such a profitable and disastrous trade."


Photo: William McCord. A room in the Guangzhou market piled knee-deep with Malaysian giant turtles, Orlitia borneensis.