Shark fin soup makes the oceans a safer place to swim! Go China!
Yeah, they could take an extra 10 seconds or so to sever their brain stems with a machete to be less cruel, but aside from that, what's the problem with putting sharks in the food chain? People gladly eat steak, but they've never seen what the cattle go through at the slaughter house. It's not pretty.
The reason that they don't eat the shark meat is because the fins demand a 100-fold markup per kg over the meat. If you had a boat that could hold 1000kg of shark meat at $2/kg or 1000kg of fins at $200/kg, what would you do with the shark bodies? That's $2,000 versus $200,000.
I love seeing all the tree-huggers protesting the shark fin trade as they throw their empty plastic water bottle in the trash and drive their SUVs and BMWs to work.