| Above: Greenlip abalone acquired through legitimate means. |
An exclusive seafood restaurant in Australia was fined $10,500 for receiving a 10 kilogram black market shipment of greenlip abalone. Regulations required the restaurant be fined a minimum of 10 times the illegal food’s actual worth at the time of purchase, and with an estimated cost of approximately $90 per kilogram the fine quickly multiplied its way to significance.
However, we can’t help but be a tad bummed by the fact that a restaurant offering a high end dining experience is purchasing black market foods and the best they can do is abalone. When we read about black market food trafficking we want it to be more like something out of The Freshman and less like a simple misunderstanding. After all, abalone might be increasingly rare, but it’ll never be on par with eating a Komodo dragon.
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