Shrimp

Shrimp

    Who doesn't like shrimp?  Okay, so as with some other foods, shrimp is one food I stopped eating decades ago.  Yes, it tastes good (Americans devoured over a billion pounds of shrimp last year --again-- or about 4 pounds per person, making the U.S. the largest importer of shrimp worldwide), but I simply couldn't get past the methods used for farm-raising them...and, like much of our chicken production, shrimp regulations are virtually nil (did I mention that they're bottom feeders so that whatever settles at the bottom --from agricultural chemicals to uneaten antibiotics-- are gobbled up by the shrimp, and later by you).  All right, I'm being a bit harsh here, for that decision is mine alone and many, many of my friends absolutely love to eat shrimp...and then there's also the people (brave people, I might add) out there harvesting the wild shimp.

    Turns out that when the ocean water is at its roughest (high waves and stormy seas), the shrimp are plentiful for the ocean bottom is being stirred up and that means food is also being churned up.  But for the shrimp trawlers on top of the seas, it is the most dangerous times to begin hauling in the now-full nets.  As a report in The New York Book Review said: Commercial fishermen have the second-highest occupational fatality rate in the US, 80.8 per 100,000, which is nearly twenty-five times the national average. (Loggers come first, with a rate of 109.5 per 100,000.)  Since 2000, an American fisherman has died, on average, every eight days...Steven Branch, a fifteen-year-old from Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama coast, was working as a deckhand on a shrimp boat called Nettie Q when his baggy shorts got caught in a winch, the mechanized apparatus that hauls trawl nets aboard once they fill with shrimp.  Branch was dragged by his shorts into the winch.  Another deckhand, checking the net, heard a loud thump, but it was too late.  Branch was dead within seconds.  Winches are responsible for nearly one third of all fatal onboard injuries in the Gulf of Mexico.

    The powerful gears needed to haul the heavy nets, filled with shrimp and other by-catch (as the article says, this by-catch includes: ...longspined porgy, Atlantic croakers, Gulf butterfish, inshore lizardfish, bonnethead sharks, glowing phosphorescent sea walnut jellyfish, sea robins, cusk eels, remoras, orange starfish, and, despite decades of conservation efforts, sea turtles...almost all of the by-catch, which amounts to five times the amount of shrimp in the net, is dead or fatally injured and is simply tossed overboard), not to mention the water-soaked nets themselves, requires tremendous power and is not easily shut down should a hand or a person get stuck into them.  Once it begins to turn, continues the article, it is difficult to arrest.  Because of the enormous amount of force involved, it doesn't just shut off like a light switch, it grinds to a halt.  It takes long enough to stop that by the time a crew member gets caught in the cable, it is already too late...This is what befell Michael Cassidy, a thirty-nine-year-old who had been a fisherman in the Florida Keys since he was a teenager.  Cassidy was planning to enter a new line of work in order to spend more time with his two teenage sons.  He was hauling in a net of shrimp onboard the Captain Ken when his glove caught in the cable.  He couldn't pull his hand out of the glove in time and he was dragged, hand first, into the winch.

    As bad as that sounds, it gets worse:  Fish are regulated much more closely than fisherman...the conditions of fishing vessels and their operators are largely ignored.  The integrity of a vessel --whether it is watertight, whether it floats-- is not tested.  As long as a boat weighs less that two hundred gross tons, crew members and captains don't need to be licensed.  A person can fish commercially without ever having previously been on a boat.  If there is an accident, captains can radio the Coast Guard, but often they are too far away for help to come in time.  Many of the Vietnamese fisherman in the Gulf are reluctant to call the Coast Guard because they don't speak English.  Boats are required to have personal flotation devices (PFDs) but shrimpers don't need to wear them.  In the last fourteen years, seventy-seven shrimp fisherman have died in the Gulf.  Nearly half died after falling overboard.  None was wearing a life jacket.

    Shrimp trawling is vastly different from shrimp farming, the trawling nets dragging at or near the sea floor (thus all the by-catch -- if you've ever seen videos of the dragging nets, they move at such a fast speed across the sea bottom that little can get out of the way, the by-catch pushed to the back of the net to be crushed or suffocated).  The nets stir up the swirling food just below the bottom, but also whatever else might be resting on the bottom; in the case of the Gulf shrimp, public relations teams try to put the public at ease that the oil/chemical spill from the British Petroleum Horizon well break is dissipated and not buried on the ocean floor or popping up in "globs," this despite the continued presence of deceased dolphins and other marine animals still washing up on Gulf shores).  It's a dangerous occupation and draws many viewers on reality shows that follow these and other fisherman (such as those pulling crabs from icy waters).

    But the demand is high, worldwide, and so shrimp farms have to make up the difference; and among those farms there is both good and bad.  The laws of supply and demand come into play and worldwide, the demand is there, and for the first time, shrimp farming produced more exports than wild caught shrimp (as just one example of this worldwide consumption, Vietnam remains the third largest importer of shrimp --primarily from India and Bangladesh-- which it then repackages and processes and exports to China). But tight farming and open-water farms have brought pathogens into the supply chain, causing Canada and other countries to begin turning away some shipments due to high amounts of antibiotics and pathogens in the shrimp tested. The natural health website, Mercola, adds: Under the US federal Country of Origin Labeling Law, also known as COOL, fresh seafood must disclose where the food was farmed or caught.  However, this rule does not apply to processed foods, including seafood that is boiled, breaded, or added to packaged meals.  Nearly half of all shrimp sold in the US are processed and therefore do not bear country of origin labels.  Restaurants are also exempt from this labeling requirement...This means that unless you're buying unprocessed seafood, it's virtually impossible to tell where it came from.

    Add to all of this the destruction of mangrove fields and the almost insatiable appetite of the carnivorous shrimp (which means grinding up more fish or dead shrimp to feed them) and you have reporters such as Alex Miffin questioning his continued eating of shrimp (his story appeared in The Huffington Post).  But, as he notes, there's are a lot of good practices emerging, including sustainable and environmentally-friendly indoor shrimp farms such as those in Indiana (highlighted by Al Jalzeera) and Maryland (at Marvesta Farms) among others.  And the practice is catching on, as both restaurants and consumers are beginning to ask exactly where their shrimp is coming from (as a side note, the U.S. inspects only 2% of its shrimp imports, while Canada --which turned away some of those earlier shipments-- inspects a bit more at 5%). 

    For better or worse, shrimp is likely here to stay since it is not only tasty, but also economical for the consumer.  But looking deeper, one has to ask at what cost?  Lost fisherman at sea, lost patches of mangrove fields, lost lives in farming the land once the farms move on, lost health in what's going into the shrimp and then later what's in you.  It's not all bad, by any means; but it will take a bit of effort on those eating shrimp to ask a few more questions...or not.  Coconut shrimp balls for under $10 (I even questioned the reliable Costco for some of their fish origins, despite the labels of "packaged in the U.S." -- turns out, with at least one of the seafood companies I reached, the fish itself came from Asia but was then sent to be packaged in the U.S., and that was as much as they were willing to tell me). 

    Shrimp is indeed worldwide and growing ever more popular...but even as shrimp appear on more and more menus and grocery shelves, the information about their origins and raising/harvesting is more and more hidden.  To find out, one has to dig deeper and deeper and deeper...or not.