Shrimped Out

            The other night I was sitting around the dinner table. I had just eaten my first dinner meal as a twenty year old and I sat awed in disbelief that I had actually made it to twenty. There was something as a kid that led me to believe I would never make it, but I reassure myself now such thinking was constrained to my teenage years. Not that you actually feel any different turning from nineteen to twenty, it may just be the least exciting birthday ever; anti-climatic in contrast with the year that is to follow.

            Nonetheless, I was sitting around my sister’s dining table in Lakewood with her, my mother, and my girlfriend. My mother had just cooked Pesto and Shrimp pasta, a meal I love. Take spaghetti, mix it in with some basil, lemon juice, garlic, onion, a few thinly diced vegetables, olive oil and that delicious pesto conjecture, top it off with some medium sized shrimp and you have an amazing and relatively quick meal. It had been years since I had been with mother when she cooked up such a magnificent and vibrant dinner. All of the ingredients in the meal I absolutely love, but that’s not what caught my attention. I had spent years living on various farms growing this vegetable and that, tending these sheep and slaughtering those chickens, shearing the sheep and milking the cows by hand – it is something I absolutely love to do. There is an aspect of being self-sufficient and raising your own food that puts all other food you ever consume to shame. I had worked at both indoor hydroponic and aquaponic farms, dealing with fish as a means to enrich the water rather than using soil. I love working with food, and as I stared at my shrimp, I realized I knew nothing about where the little creatures on my plate came from. Sure, occasionally one might get fresh shrimp from the sea, but the reality remains that just like a large percentage of the world’s fish consumed, the shrimp probably came from a farm somewhere in East Asia.

            Because shrimp are one of the most popular types of seafood in the world, approximately “5 million metric tons of shrimp are produced annually… Shrimp aquaculture, which increased nine fold during the 1990s and is one of the fastest growing forms of aquaculture, now accounts for one-third of the shrimp produced globally” (Aquaculture).  Prior to the twentieth century, large-scale shrimp farming operations were unheard of. Today, shrimp aquaculture, or the harvesting of shrimp in massive quantities represents an economic market dominating China, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Brazil, Ecuador and Bangladesh. The vast majority of this shrimp is than imported into the United States, the European Union, and Japan for consumption. There is something that turns off the senses when you realize your shrimp is a pawn in a farm rather than a creature in the sea; but then again, most livestock represents masses awaiting their slaughter for human consumption – it’s just how our global population feeds itself, and we love our food. Because shrimp are found in both fresh and salt water, they become that much easier to mass-produce and harvest. Thailand now represents the largest shrimp-exporting country in the world.

            Despite the fact that commercial shrimp farming wasn’t introduced until the seventies, humans have been hunting and eating the swimming crustaceans for millennia. Shrimp aquaculture has taken over as a profitable means to produce shrimp so that twenty-year-old birthday boys such as myself are able to enjoy shrimp wherever and whenever they want – even in springtime Colorado. The consequences of commercial shrimp farming have led to unprecedented and unsustainable practices that eventually destroy our value for the environment as well as value for the organisms that compromise human diets. “The explosion in the number of intensively operated shrimp farms has not only impacted the costal zone of Thailand, but has also resulted in an unsustainable aquaculture industry. Abandonment of shrimp ponds due to either drastic, disease-caused collapses or more gradual, year to –year reduction in the productivity of the pond is common” (Dierberg and Kiattisimkul). One rarely thinks of the environmental implications when enjoying a delicious meal of Shrimp and Pesto pasta. However, the implications still remain. “As integrated aquaculture management practice becomes more the practice than the exception, less risk of crop failure to the industry and reduced discharge loadings from intensively managed shrimp ponds to receiving waters can be expected”  (Dierberg and Kiattisimkul).

            I never really thought about looking into the shrimp I eat. I do know that the next time I purchase shrimp to cook at home, it is going to be ocean harvested in open waters rather than contained to the walls of a fish farm in Thailand. And that goes for all of the seafood I purchase from now on – I am going to make it a point to eat fresh and happy sea-dwellers rather than the commercially farmed fish that fuel the large corporations of the world. When it comes down to eating right, I don’t just think of eating food that was produced in an ethical manner, but I also think about supporting the average fisherman rather than the Monsanto’s and Tyson’s of the world. At some point, the world is going to have to readdress the way we consume, and I do believe that point in time is knocking on the door as we speak.

Works Cited

"Aquaculture." WWF. Web. May 2012.

<http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/aquaculture/dialogues-shrimp.html>.

Dierberg, Forrest E., and Woraphan Kiattisimkul. "Issues, Impacts, and Implications of

Shrimp Aquaculture in Thailand." SpringerLink. Springer Science Business Media, 1996. Web. May 2012. <http://www.springerlink.com/content/n3w5871569222414/>.