Shark-fins seem better on the table than when slicing through the sea. But even the Chinese admit, while serving shark-fin soup as an expensive, prestigious delicacy, that the fin’s taste is nothing to write home about. And now the moment has come to give it up. With growing riches, crowds of middle-class folk are breaking into the elite club of shark-fin soup consumers, angling for the prestige, the ceremonial glow, the sexual boost, the high-class skin betokened by the fin. Even sharks in their thousands are no match for human appetite, or so groups such as the Shark Angels, Shark Whisperers and Shark Huggers fear. In an access of sensitivity, China has decided to ban shark-fin soup from government banquets — in three years. Perhaps traders need time to mourn their wealth and their patrons the magic.

What a culture bans in the raw and the cooked — and the mixed and the squeezed — is as intriguing as what it welcomes to its table. Would the nostalgia around the shark-fin soup, when it does disappear, match the longing for the stifling green melancholy surrounding absinthe, the drink brooded over by Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, by Verlaine and Rimbaud, figuring on Hemingway’s table and in his tales? But the reason for that ban was health — its charm lay in hallucination — not the survival of a species. It was something like “Nanny” Bloomberg closing in on large sugary drinks in New York to stop people from getting fat. It may be an entirely different matter to wrench a fish from its lovers. As the hilsa becomes rarer and more expensive, fears that the Bengali will no longer see it on his table, or on the banana leaf as he sits cross-legged on the floor, cannot be kept at bay. He has adored it, stroked its raw silver sides, cooked it lovingly in gloriously delicious ways — and has eaten up too much. With the seasonal ban on fishing beginning to fade in the face of such appetite, the hilsa, raw or cooked, is threatening to fade too, auguring a cultural implosion.

But one man’s fish may be another man’s poison. The Japanese puffer fish is lethal enough to kill by the toxin that hides in its skin, so Americans will not have it. But the Japanese love it, their fugu, and have been serving it for hundreds of years. The slip, of course, is between the raw and the rightly cooked. Poisons come in many forms as well, and the cultural is no less fearsome than the physical. Will children in France mourn the tomato ketchup? The government has banned it in primary schools for it “masks the taste of everything else”. Is this pride in French cooking or a stand against Mickey Mouse? Maybe the ketchup is slightly less innocent than the samosa, banned as “offensive” in Somalia by militant groups on trucks with loudspeakers. The shark-fin soup may waltz slowly to a far more elegant exit if, that is, the fins last three years. And, since the fins promise such good sex, will more tiger products be sold to make up for the gap in the list of aphrodisiacs?