Jaws With Pineapple Salsa

After going to the gym and getting my truck inspected I went to the grocery store with the intent of buying crab legs and flounder for dinner. I got the flounder but found they had no crab legs. They did have shark, though... Go figure. I never tried it so I thought I would give it a go. If it was gross or if I cooked it badly (thereby rendering it gross) it didn't matter - I always had peanut butter sandwiches at the ready and will have gained a few XP nonetheless. Win-win.

For those of you who have never had shark steaks, do yourself a favor and try them. They are very easy to cook – just brush them with a little bit of olive oil and throw them on the grill. You just kind of know when they are done. If you can cook a beef steak, you can cook these. Since I had some pineapple and some pepperoncinis I made a quick salsa – equal parts of each, a little cracked pepper and a little olive oil.

How was it? Shark meat is the least fishy tasting fish I have ever tried. It has the texture of (and tastes very much like) steak. Really unexpectedly amazing. My impromptu salsa also rocked, FWIW. Definitely getting shark steaks more often.

Some of you might be thinking “Oh, la-ti-freaking-da, Uncle Moneybags. Aren't you afraid that the cost of your exotic snack will dip into your 50-year-old-scotch-and-monocle-polish fund? Boo-hoo... you had to cook it yourself? What's the matter? Didn't it come pre-packaged with a team of geisha that prepared and fed it to you while they entertained you on the shamisen?”

Um... no. But I understand where you are coming from.

The 4-oz steak I bought was $2.40. This is on par cost-wise with sirloin steak and might even be a little cheaper. This brings me to the real point of this article: How is that even remotely possible?

According to Wikipedia, 800,000 tons of sharks are caught each year around the globe. Assuming an average weight of a mako is 800 pounds per shark that's about 2 million sharks per year. Yikes, that's a lot.

But how many cows die per year? Shockingly, I couldn't find an easy answer to that but WolframAlpha thinks that 70 million tons of beef are consumed worldwide each year. The average cow weighs 1,400 pounds that means that 100 million delicious, delicious cows volunteer to become food each year. (Obviously, I am assuming, here, that about the same percentages of shark and cow are steak-able... This is wrong, but not super-wrong... probably close, even).

Doesn't this mean that, on average, shark steaks should cost fifty times as much as a cow steak of the same size? Also, I didn't mention that the shark steak I bought came from Ecuador! Ecuador, man!  Not only is that 2,500 miles away but I would think that it must take a lot of specialized people, time, and equipment to hunt, catch, and kill a shark. In comparison, to hunt, catch, and kill a cow would take me about 20 cents in gas, about five minutes, and a rock.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know jack about economics but that just blows me away. I mean, what kind of world do we live in where I can get a hunk of shark meat sent to me from near the source of the Amazon River for about the cost of a typical shipping fee on a book from Amazon.com?

Answer: A freaking awesome one.