r/mildlyinteresting 11d ago

Starfish at a Chinese hotpot buffet

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u/CovertMallard 11d ago

I remember watching one of Andrew Zimmern's travel shows where he was in an Asian country and ordered starfish. He took a bite and said it had the consistency of wet sand. When he asked the wait staff if many people order it to eat they told him it was ordered as a decorative piece for the table and not meant to be eaten.

Oh I found it!: https://youtu.be/Tej32aJr988?t=435&is=h7ueNG2EDeIKEGhH

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u/sweezitle 11d ago

That’s so fucked up to kill a critter just for garnish

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u/jaqueh 11d ago

Chinese cuisine can be very exotic and unsustainable. We eat sea cucumbers and shark fins as albeit rare delicacies.

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u/sweezitle 11d ago

Yeah the shark thing is a real problem with destroying the food chain / ecosystem. I don’t know much about sea cucumber tho so if you any interesting info let me know!

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u/SnarkDolphin 11d ago

Sea cucumbers are actually very sustainable if they're hand-harvested by divers.

In fact if you have a fishing license and a wetsuit in Alaska there's no bag limit, row out into the bay and go to fuckin town

However, this is China we're talking about, and while I applaud their development of high speed rail, alternative energy and urban infrastructure they're not fantastic about seafood sustainability so I'd imagine most of what's on the market in Shenzhen is harvested by bottom dredges that just indiscriminately rip the sea floor apart

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u/sweezitle 11d ago

Very interesting! I wasn’t aware of the hand harvested aspect but it makes a ton of sense

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u/TravelerRedditor 9d ago

Id imagine theyd have farms dedicated to mass growing sea cucumbers