Angry Planet - The Horrors Behind Your Frozen Shrimp

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

Americans love shrimp. They love it so much they don’t think too hard about where it comes from—or the virtual slaves who are farming them. Joshua Farinella doesn’t have that luxury.A few years ago, Farinella took a job working for a shrimp production company in India. The money they were paying would set his family up for a long time to come, but what he saw when he landed in the country made him realize the cash wasn’t worth it. He chose to blow the whistle.On this episode of Angry Planet, Farinella sits down with us to talk about what he saw in the shrimp factory. It all starts one fateful night when he receives a WhatsApp message telling him that one of the plant’s workers was caught in the place’s water treatment facility. “She was searching for a way out of there,” the message said. “Her contractor is not allowing her to go home.”After Farinella decided to blow the whistle, he began to document what he saw at the plant. Video, audio, and documents he secured can be viewed at The Outlaw Ocean Project. Read The Whistleblower at The Outlaw Ocean ProjectRead through the documents.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. We haven't been doing intros for a while at all, but I feel like this one almost requires one a little bit. We're going to talk about shrimp today. We're going to talk about the shrimp industry. You got an email from the Al-Wa Ocean Project.

who we've had on before, did quite a few episodes kind of about where we learned all about the horrifying things that happen in international waters and that happened

the things that happen to make sure the food that you love gets to your belly. And that's kind of what today's episode is about. So with that, is it Josh or Joshua?

Josh is fine. Josh, can you introduce yourself? Sure. My name is Josh Farinella, former general manager of Choice Canning Company, Unit 4 in India. So you're here today to talk to us about shrimp and kind of your experiences working in India. And I wanted to get some really basic background stuff out of the way here at the top. Because I learned I'm not a big seafood person. I just, you know, I walk through the grocery store.

I see the bags. It's just big bags of frozen shrimp. I don't think about where any of that comes from. And reading the story that you're involved in, I perhaps should be thinking a great deal more about where my food comes from. So can you tell me just give me some rough numbers of like the frozen food, shrimp industry, where this stuff comes from, how much frozen shrimp or is America, is the world eating every year?

Do we, you know, I mean, not to put you on the spot with hard numbers right at the top. So in terms of the frozen shrimp that that we consume over here, it's, you know, in sales volumes, it's billions and billions of dollars a year worth of product that the U.S. consumer is buying every year. And how many shrimp is that? I'm joking. That was a joke. It's good because I almost got the calculator out. And what is your, what is your background?

How do you come to work? Before you go to India, what is it that you're doing? What is your, what was your LinkedIn profile? So my background is in regulatory compliance and quality assurance, primarily in the seafood industry. So that would, yeah, that would cover everything from, you know, food safety and quality assurance. right on up through the social accountability, human rights due diligence. So how do you come to take a job in India? And why? It's, so the company that I went to work for in India, Choice Canning Company, I worked for

them previously in their U.S. manufacturing facility from 2015 up through the end of 2020. So I already had a good relationship with the company. Then at the end of, well, towards the end of 2023, they reached out to me and recruited me for a general manager position at a new factory that they were opening in Andra Pradesh, India. It was, you know, the opportunity was essentially life-changing. You know, it was go over there for five years. And at the end of that five years, essentially be able to come back

here and, you know, be retired or semi-retired. It was $300,000 a year? Yes. And cheap to live in India, I would assume. I had, you know, next to zero living expenses over there. So you were going to come back with more than a million dollars, be able to kind of support your family for do everything you needed to do, pay off debt, all that kind of stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, pay off any debt that I had. that was put my daughter through college. That was, I mean, like I said, it was life-changing. Everything would, you know, you'd like to think it would get easier after that. And what was your understanding of what the job would be? It was, you know, full oversight of this particular factory. That included everything from the shrimp coming in and shipping out to the living conditions for the workers.

everything that that happened on site would have been my responsibility. You said living condition of the workers. The workers lived on site? There are about 650 migrant workers who live on site. Yes. When you're talking about migrants in India, where do migrants come from? Because we're used to Latin America mostly here in the state. So I don't know what people would think, you know, what it means there.

The migrant workers came from, I mean, they were also in India. They were just in a different state. In this case, most of them were from Orissa, which is pretty much, I think it's one or two states above all north of Andhra Pradesh. When you get there, can you kind of describe coming to the plant and what it looks like and your general feeling about the place when you arrive? No, my feeling when I arrived, I mean, it was a pretty positive. pretty positive feeling. You know, everything seemed, you know, exactly how it should be, you know,

in terms of what the facility, like the production facility itself and the kind of, you know, birds eye view I had of all the on-site conditions. So, you know, at first glance, everything seemed fine. Yeah, but can you describe, like, what a shrimp plant looks like,

uh, to the audience? Because I think the pictures are pretty striking. The walls are seven feet high. I would describe it as a compound. Yeah, it's definitely, you could definitely call it a compound. There's a security gate to get in, seven, eight-foot concrete wall all the way around the facility. You have your manufacturing facility itself, plus your dormitory kitchen, you know, living areas.

And how quickly do you kind of start to get unsettled? And what is the first incident that occurs that makes you start to think that maybe this is not the dream job you thought it was? The first incident was a text message that I got in the middle of the night, like 2.30 in the morning from one of the production managers who was on site. He told me there was one of the migrant worker who was running through the compound. you know, into the water treatment portion of the compound, trying to get over the wall to leave because, I mean, the only actual gate you have to leave has a security guard at it and that security guard wouldn't allow her to leave. And her labor contractor wanted her to pay money to be able to leave. Um, you know, so with a background in, you know, your social accountability and human rights due diligence, this, this throws a lot of red flags up right away. Can you kind of walk us through those red flags? This is not just how business is done in India. I mean, at first blush, to me, it sounds awful.

Like, it sounds like you are, if you are up in the middle of the night walking through the water treatment facility trying to escape a plant, like, it sounds like you're a prisoner to me. So is that, I mean, did you read it kind of the same way? So, I mean, what I know is, Yes, every country has their own kind of set of, you know, labor laws. I mean, there'll be, you know, minor differences country to country. But at the end of the day, one thing that's universal is you can choose to work there and you can choose to leave whenever you want.

This particular instance told me that no, something's wrong here because this, if this worker was allowed to leave whenever she wanted to, she could have walked right out the front gate. what were your like why did they kind of why did they rope I guess because you're the plant manager right that's why you're coming in um so are they just letting you know that there's an incident in the plant uh did they think that did anyone else think that this was strange was there an attempt to kind of cover it up or what was the attitude towards this incident so when i addressed the incident or we'll ask about it the next day in our, you know, kind of pre-shift meetings to start the day. It was explained to me that it was just a misunderstanding. You know, this worker was fine to leave as long as it was daytime out.

And yeah, it was just explained to me that it was a misunderstanding. There were no actual issues here. Everything's, you know, resolved. The worker's gone home. But did you ever talk to, did you ever, do you know what happened to that worker? Did you ever talk to them? Was there any kind of follow up? I don't know what happened to that worker.

Actually talking with any of the migrant workers or most of the local workers was kind of difficult as I didn't speak the language. So anytime I need to speak with somebody, I needed to have somebody else in management with me so they could translate anything. But this worker, no, I didn't get a chance to talk to. And the other managers obviously had a vested interest in making sure everything seemed fine, right? Correct. So were you the only outsider in management there, meaning like non-Indian? Yes, I was the only non-Indian in management there. Why did they bring you in specifically from out of the country?

So I like to think it's because I already, I mean, like I said, I worked for them for five years in the past. So I already knew the company. I knew the products. I had a good relationship with ownership. So I like to think that's what got me the opportunity to go over there this time. Can I ask a question while we're right in here? This is going back a little bit. But when you're describing the plant and people's living conditions,

which I love to know a little bit more about, what does it smell like? I mean, how bad is it? Um, you know, let's see, uh, there's, there's, uh, several dorm rooms, you know, where everybody's kind of broken up and put into. And I don't know, rough estimate, how big is that room behind you that you, that you're in now? Um, excuse me, I'd say it's about 15 by 25 feet. Okay, so one of the dorm rooms, one of the male dorm rooms is maybe, you know, 20 by 40. Okay.

And there are bunks up and down it. There are, you know, four rows of bunks, three high with 60 plus men in that room living there. Okay. And it's only bunks. There's nowhere to store your, any personal property that you brought with you. There's no chair to just sit down and relax on. You just have a room, concrete floor, concrete walls, bunks. Dirty mattress.

You probably don't have blankets, pillows, sheets. You just have a dark concrete room with bunks and people. Was that what you expected? What did you expect? What would you have thought was appropriate? So, I mean, obviously you're going to have bunks in there for people to sleep on, but I wouldn't expect you to be packed in there like sardines. I would expect you to have at least a nightstand next to your bed.

Right. So maybe packed in like shrimp? I'm joking. Come on. You said sardines. You know. All right, all right. Sorry, that was terrible.

All right. In that case, it was a lot of shrimp in a small bag. Okay. And when do you, at a certain point, you decide that you're going to start recording things because like the stories are full of video that's shot later, but there's a lot of recordings. Well, of WhatsApp messages, a lot of documentation. You decide to become a whistleblower. Is it just this first incident? Or do other things happen that make you decide that that's what you need to do?

It was several things that kept happening. And when I would ask about them, it would always be explained that, oh, it's just a misunderstanding. You know, it's just a one-off scenario. You know, from the workers not being paid the required minimum wages to, you know, issues of, you know, issues. of food safety with antibiotics in the shrimp to, it just, everything just kept piling up where it stopped being misunderstandings and one-offs and started being a very clear pattern of just do whatever you have to to get shrimp out the door. What are the minimum wages?

The, uh, so the minimum wage for these, for the production workers over there would be 450 rupees per day. what they were being paid was 350 rupees per day. I went through, I was trying to renegotiate some of these wages, and I didn't know that 450 was the minimum wage at the time, so I proposed to increase the 400, and somebody came back to me in HR and said, no, if you're going to raise it, you have to raise it to $450,

which kind of blew my mind. But then when I reached out to ownership to, kind of, you know, find out what was going on. An email came back from the owner saying, you know, I can't believe we're not paying minimum wage. We always pay our people, what we're supposed to pay. We pay them on time. And right after that, HR chimed in with the legal team and copy. It said, sir, we paid them exactly how you told us to pay them. Because you said we weren't going to be here very long, so don't bother. What does that mean we're not going to be here very long?

So the facility that I wound up being placed at was temporary, well, supposed to be temporary while a new, new factory was being built. But at the time of that minimum wage email, choice had already been there going on two years. So it's supposed to be like a stopgap factory. Maybe that was kind of the excuse for some of the conditions? perhaps was just that we're going to come in, we'll have this temporary factory, we're building the fancy new place where everything will be in compliance once we get there. So, no, I don't buy that in terms of the migrant workers who had to live there on site, because it would have been just as easy to put a number of migrant workers on site

who could actually fit comfortably on site and then bring in local workers, every day to to make up so no the living conditions on site were I don't know it was kind of

they knew and it didn't matter and people were generally not allowed to leave sometimes for months is that correct they would be working literally

like months at a time um try for over a year with no day off. There was a group of, you know, labor contractors who came to me and asked about a group of migrant women who had been working for over a year with no day off. So they wanted to try and schedule a day off for them so they could all go out in town and do something together.

How are they, how often are they, I mean, again, typical in America for us to think of ourselves having the weekend, right? How often are per labor laws in India you're supposed to have a day off if you're working at one of these factories? So you're still supposed to have at least one day off per week or two in any 14-day period? How is any of this enforceable on the, like, How do you keep control of a workforce that is getting up in the middle of the night and trying to exit through the water treatment system? Like, why is there not more trouble at the plant?

What do you mean? Again, maybe it's just American brain. But like, if why, if I was being forced to work or not forced, if I was working in a shrimp factory in a compound, and had been for over a year and couldn't get a day off, I don't know what I would do. It would not be pleasant. I just can't imagine that there are not more labor disputes, that there is not more action taken on the part of the workers.

How do you, who is in charge of these people day to day? So they're like the immediate people who are in charge of the migrant workers. are their labor contractors. And ultimately, choice canning is responsible for these workers. But they're not going to, I mean, the workers themselves, I mean, they can't raise too much of a stink. I mean, they're away from home. They don't know anybody there. They're not from that area.

Who do you call? So there's a, there's like a third party labor contractor that goes and gets labor a couple states away, brings in all of these people to a factory where nobody knows, where they know anybody and then you kind of go into the compound and you don't come out until your contracts up? Is that basically how it works? So there's there are instances where some of these workers are allowed to leave for certain amounts of time like a couple hours here and there. They have to get a gate pass from their contractor. They have to present it to security. They're not allowed to leave for any overnights. They're allowed to, you know, go to the market and

come right back. That's, I mean, that's if they have the, the downtime to be able to do it. I mean, they still work every day. How do they, if they go to the market, who makes sure they come back? So they have to, I mean, I, you know, if they decided not to come back, I don't think anybody is going to go try and track them down. Okay. But, I mean, you still have to.

any pay for these workers still goes through their contractors. So, I mean, they kind of have, they have to come back for that. And all their, any property that they have is still going to be at the compound. Such as it is having no nightstand, no storage in their bunk beds. How tight are the margins on shrimp that this is the way, that the labor force is treated. They're actually not that tight. I think it's, I mean, I kind of think it's just greed.

You know, you keep your production costs down. You sell it for a higher price and, you know, your profit margins are higher than, I mean, then they would be if you were paying everybody what they were supposed to be paid. All right, angry planet listeners, want to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. We are once again talking about the horrors related to where your shrimp comes from. Can you also tell me about, like, conditions on the factory floor,

what they're supposed to look like and what they actually look like? So on site, most of the conditions were very good. Everything is, you know, properly cleaned, properly sanitized. So the issues I had were never The on-site issues in terms of hygiene The issues I had were these off-site Kind of hidden peeling sheds Where they're completely unregulated

So, you know, essentially anything goes It's just get shrimp in, get the shrimp back out What's a peeling shed? It would be like Say you have your kitchen and if you're going to cook dinner for somebody, you know, it's, I mean, you're going to use clean countertops to prep everything. You know, you're going to use, you know, clean pans. You're going to do everything. Everything so that your guests aren't going to

get sick from what you're cooking. The peeling shed would be essentially if you decided you're going to go cook dinner out in, you know, your backyard where you store your lawnmower. Well, like, what, what is the process of peeling? That's like, taking it out of the shell and like devaning it. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Gotcha. And like what's go, what do these peeling sheds look like?

It's, it's just a, you know, a plain concrete building kind of open air. So you can't control, you know, anything, any kind of contaminants getting into the building.

Kind of rusty tables that you're peeling the shrimp on. no temperature control. I mean, your raw seafood that you're peeling there, it needs to be temperature controlled, otherwise things grow on it. The clothes that these workers are wearing in the peeling sheds are pretty much their street clothes.

And they, you know, locally, the poverty level is very high. So these workers don't have, you know, a different change of clothes, clean clothes to come in every day. there's a there's a high likelihood that whatever you're wearing to peel the shrimp that day, you probably wore it the day before. There's a possibility you slept in it. You know, when you ate your meals earlier or the day before, you were probably sitting in the dirt eating it. So there's no, no hygiene to speak of at all in these sheds.

Why do, why are the peeling sheds unregulated? Well, they're unregulated because they're not disclosed to anybody. They're not supposed to be there. Correct. This is not how business is done or supposed to be done. Right. I mean, if everybody, like if you disclosed them to, you know, the FDA or, you know, your food safety inspection services over in India, then they would have to be regulated and audited and, you know, all of your sanitation and everything would have to be verified and validated on a regular basis. basis. But if you don't tell them about it, then it's...

So, yeah, you don't have any of that. So did you ever have an incident where, like, an inspector would come by to, like, look at the place? Is that a thing that happens? It's a thing that happens at the actual, the main factory, you know, at the compound there. I mean, the facility is audited several times a year by, you know, various auditing bodies that, you know, some of the customers require. But even in these cases, I mean, they're not told about these peeling sheds. I mean, they're not told about the number of migrant workers who are on site.

And really, you could only audit what we show you. So it's always a dog and pony show when the auditor shows up. Absolutely. Did they, was there a sense that they knew that they were putting on a show? for these auditors. They kind of know what they were doing. You mean, did the auditors know they were getting the dog and pony show? No, did the, did the company know that it was putting on a dog and pony show?

I guess, like, how am I trying to say this? There's a, there's a version of this where it's incompetence to a certain extent, where it's a company that's got out over at skis, and to a certain extent is just trying to, like, get through the workday and fulfill contracts. And so you end up setting a peeling shed because it's faster. You're like, oh, we'll get it regulated later and we'll get it up to standards later. Things go on a little bit too long.

But then there's another version of this where you know you can work faster and get things done if you have an unregulated peeling shed. And you are going to, from the beginning, make sure that nobody sees that peeling shed. In this case, it is very well orchestrated. It's very well thought out, and it's very intentionally deceptive. Gotcha. Did they ever direct you to, do they ever kind of try to bring you in, or was it understood? Like, how complicit did they try to make you?

It was, I mean, it was talked, like these, yeah, it was talked about so freely that it was just expected that I was going to, you know, go along with it. Who had the job before you? Do you have any idea? The gentleman who had the job before me is currently facing some theft charges from Choice Canning over there. Yeah, yeah, it's a little bit of a common legal situation there. Gotcha. So I wanted to ask, and this is one of these questions that made. may be like a quirk of translation, but it just struck me. In some of the audio you have, you're speaking to a woman, and they refer to these supervisors as wardens.

And I just thought that that was an interesting choice of words for the people that are overseeing your labor force. it's um that the uh the people they were referring to where the uh were these other people who work for the labor contractors who are kind of stationed at the dormitory areas and monitor you know that coming and going of the migrant workers uh they're the ones who would issue these gate passes to let them get out or not issue them but that's those are the people who were, you know, kind of keeping tabs on everybody there. So Warden is maybe not a terrible choice of words, then? I guess and no.

Can we talk about, there's kind of the back half of the story was a bunch of stuff I didn't know about antibiotics and shrimp, which I thought was pretty fascinating. why are antibiotics and shrimp a big deal? A couple reasons why they're a big deal. One is they could, you know, kind of lead to, you know, other antibiotic resistant strains of, you know, bacteria over here in the states. to the FDA lists possible carcinogenic effects from them. And one of the things with the antibiotics in aquaculture shrimp there is, you know,

choice is one of their certifications as a best aquaculture practices certification. And that means we're buying shrimp from farms who are all. also certified to that standard and have also been on paper certified that they do not use any antibiotics in these shrimp. So when we regularly get, you know, shrimp coming into the factory that test positive for antibiotics, you know, again, there's more red flags there. Like, if we're only buying from these certified suppliers and they don't use antibiotics, why are they here? and that led to another conversation with a QA manager at the time who said, yeah, we actually don't buy from any of those certified farms.

We just buy from local unregistered farms. That's where he said there's two different sets of documentation. You know, going back to auditing, like one of them is what you show the auditors saying, hey, we're only buying from here. And the other is the way things really are where we just buy from wherever. Did they ever try to bring you in on this? Meaning like saying, hey, you know what, for an extra 50 bucks a day? Or, you know, I mean, here's something to ignore this.

I think it's one of those things that it was just expected for me to be okay with. Okay. So, I mean, every time it happened where we had antibiotic positive shrimp that was already packed for a customer or right when we received. it to the factory, I would immediately send a text or call one of the owners say, hey, we've got this here. What are we doing with it?

You know, hoping that he would say, you know, destroy it, send it back, you know, do anything with it besides pack it and ship it. But the response was always ship it. It was always, you know, send it to the U.S. because the customers need product.

What are the advantages of using antibiotics and shrimp. Is it that you're going to get a certain amount of shrimp that's diseased and has to be destroyed unless you use antibiotics? Is that kind of why? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of controlling your cost. I mean, you're going to wind up with more shrimp that you could sell.

The farmers would have more shrimp that they could sell. It would lower their mortality and disease rates. Gotcha. Is there a sense that this is kind of, would you say choice canning is atypical, or is this kind of the way business is done? So I've never, I've never been to another shrimp manufacturing facility over there, but I can say that, you know, the Outlaw Ocean Project released this story, you know, the same day as the corporate accountability labs and the AP story.

And they all, while they don't mention choice canning, they mention other companies that are doing the same things that choice canning was doing. So it does seem to be, you know, industry-wide. I guess you'd fall behind if you actually didn't do it, right? I mean, if you, if one company is doing it to undercut, it would undercut everybody else. So it creates an environment that encourages this kind of thing, right? Yes. You said you found a hidden dormitory in the story? Yeah. So there's, um, one section of the compound, you know, has two fairly large buildings.

One houses the women, one houses the men. And then there's another section that's on top of an equipment building, ammonia compressors and various machinery. And I was, you know, walking around one day, I saw a flight of stairs, said, hey, let's, you know, go see what's up on the roof here.

And there's another, another dormitory building housing men where there's just dirty mattresses on the floor, and that's what these men have to sleep on. So it was another housing area for migrant workers where it had far more workers than it had bed space. Is that the recorded conversation where somebody to the effect of we have to clean up this area to make it look like there's only 500 beds? in here. If somebody walks by and there's 520 beds, then we're over in the audit.

I know I'm butchering it. No, no. So that was kind of the common theme for any audit that came on site or especially any social accountability audit. The dormitory areas, they have enough, you know, toilets and showers for 250 workers. They have enough bed space. for 500 or 550 workers, but there were actually over 650 workers on site. So when one of these audits was going to happen, then there would be this kind of plan put into action.

So when the auditor gets here, we're going to make sure that we get these workers offsite, ship them somewhere else, have their labor contractors go rent building, space somewhere else for the day and just stash them there so that we don't so that the auditor doesn't see all of these people here. So you get a day off when the auditor comes. Sorry, terrible joke.

So when you, how long are you there before you decide that you need to blow the whistle and you start collecting documents? How quickly does that moment come for you? It came mid-January, but it finally reached that point where, you know, like I said, it was so many things that were explained to me as just being, you know, misunderstandings that it was just pattern. I was already familiar with work of the Outlaw Ocean project before that. So I reached out to Ian, you know, mid-January and proposed it as kind of a hypothetical situation. Like, hey, if, you know, X, Y, and Z was happening, you know, what do you think? And then, you know, we started from there.

And then how long after you've made that decision do you stay? I left there on, I left India on February 15. Okay. So you weren't there, like not there. long after you kind of make the decision that you don't longer need to be there. No, about a month. And the, you know, the timing of me coming back to the states here, you know, my wife already was already planning on coming out and visiting me from, you know, the second through the 15. And it just made more sense to get on the same flight as her going back home.

And were you, like, when you're in there and you kind of know that you're done with this place and you're collecting information, was it difficult for you to continue to work day to day, knowing that your job has changed, right? You're now a whistleblower. It's now kind of about gathering evidence while kind of keeping up appearances. It was difficult.

you know, and there was a lot of, you know, evidence and documentation that I needed to kind of gather while still, you know, doing my job. There were, you know, there were certainly a few times where, you know, kind of paranoia took over, you know, I guess you could say. But, I mean, yeah, it got a little complicated. Tell me about a time when paranoia took over. So in my, you know, just in my day-to-day travels to and from work, you know, wherever else I needed to go. You'd always pass by, you know, several police officers out in town. And none of them carry any kind of firearms, you know, no handcuffs, no baton. You know, no, they all had a whistle.

That was all they had. There was one day where I was coming, I went to one of the external peeling sheds. and, you know, made a recording there. And on my way back to my apartment, my wife sends me a text, you know, with a picture on it where there's a military unit outside of my apartment. You know, addressed full camouflage, automatic weapons. So that was one of those heart jumping out of the chest moments. Because, like I said, I pass by cops all the time there and they carry a whistle. These guys are showing up with machine guns outside of my apartment.

Why were they there? I have no idea. Is it serious business enough that they would, if they had known, they would have sicked the military on you? You know what? I don't know. Yeah, I really don't know. And how do you, do you just get on a flight and not show up to work the next day? They know that you were quitting?

I sent an email. I sent a resignation email. On the 15th, I said I'm going to use two weeks of leave time. And, you know, effective March 1st, I'm resigning my position. Okay. So you, and they got that like before you got on the plane? They got that while I was in the airport. Smart.

And have there been any, what was their reaction? Were they worried? Did they wish you all the best? Did they want an exit interview? The only response I got was a WhatsApp message from one of the owners. We're sorry things didn't work out, but we need to ensure a smooth transition. Give me a call.

I did not return the message or call back. Fair enough. And how have things been since you've gotten back to the States? a little hectic, a little stressful. You know, stressful in terms of, you know, I just left a $300,000 a year to come back to being unemployed. You know, stressful in terms of I know this story's coming out.

What's the fallout going to be? But I've pretty much moved past that. I mean, I started a new job. You know, the story's out. you know, life is still good. Has there been any consequences for, we're maybe edging again into territory that we can't talk about, but I've got to ask,

have there been any consequences for them yet? I'm really not sure. I know that, you know, they did issue a response to the story that pretty much just said, no, none of that's true. But otherwise, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if their product is still on the shelves at the local grocery stores or if the customer said, no, let's take a step back from this. I don't know.

They had already lost or were in the process of losing, like, one of their major contracts. That's in the story, right? Like, is it Aldi Foods? Didn't like some of what they were seeing? So Aldi was coming on site the first week of March to do a, social audit. And that was one of those audits where there were plans being made to move the migrant workers offsite to hide everybody from them. I was already gone, so I don't know exactly what happened in that audit.

Gotcha. Did you ever tell, I mean, the story's out now. So in a wide way, like, they all know. All the auditors, I would assume, know what's going on. Did you ever send any messages to them? these auditors directly? Did you ever pull them aside and say like, hey, you should go look over in this location, take a look over here, maybe point them in the direction of things that they would, they probably, you know, point them to appealing shed? I haven't, I didn't reach out to any of the auditors. I mean, it's especially the best aquaculture practice auditing that the, I mean, it's the global seafood alliance who owns that auditing standard. And I, I know, you know, choice canning was kind of the darling company of the global seafood alliance, you know,

corporate sponsors, you know, that, so I think if anything, there might be a certain level of, you know, maybe embarrassment or, you know, really what did we get ourselves into? So it's kind of an area that I don't want to step in. And also we missed this. How did we miss this? You know, if you're an auditor, if you're an auditor and you missed all of this, I would be pretty upset with myself, I would think. It's like your whole job is to find these things, right? But then again, Choice Canning and other companies

are very practiced in making sure that you don't see them. Correct. And like I said, you could only audit what you're shown. Right. What do you think happens next? And how do we think, how do they

fix this problem? So, I know that there is, you know, congressional interest in the story and what's what's been happening over there. The House Committee Natural Resources requested a lot of documentation from me so that they could look into this a little bit more. I know that, well, what I think needs to happen is, I mean, I don't think we could expect any of these suppliers to just say, you know, hey guys, we should, let's change and do things the right way.

I think what needs to happen is their customers need to find a way to do, you know, more in-depth research on who they're purchasing from. You know, the consumers, we shouldn't have to do that level of research. I mean, we pick something off the shelves at the grocery store and we shouldn't have to stop and ask, hey, is it safe? you know, hey, what kind of conditions were these workers who made this living in? So it shouldn't fall back on the consumer. I think it's the customers of the manufacturer who have to really step up and do a lot more work on this.

Do you eat frozen shrimp anymore? I do. I just pay more attention to where it's coming from. You know, the U.S. has a solid, you know, gulp shrimp fishery. There are other countries out there that supply a quality product. So for a listener that is, you know, they've got their podcasts on, and they're in the grocery store right now, and they're in the frozen food aisle, and they're thinking about getting some shrimp.

Is there anything they can look out for? what do you look for on the bag that kind of let you know that maybe this bag of frozen shrimp is more ethically and safely produced than another? I might avoid, I mean, I might tell people to avoid buying from certain countries that have history of, you know, any of these labor abuses or, you know, packaging and possibly unsafe product. I mean, there's kind of that whole corridor from, you know, India right on through Southeast Asia there where it always has some sort of issue with those things. Gotcha. So just kind of see where it's made and try to get something from a Gulf Shrimpery, basically.

Yeah, yeah, basically. Well, Joshua, thank you so much for coming on to, and Jason, do you have another? No, thanks. I would just say that, you know, the AP also, as long as the Outlaw Ocean Project has done some really cool stuff on this. And they also did another piece a while ago on Bangladesh, which makes you for sure not want to eat shrimp from Bangladesh either. See, I don't eat, I don't eat a lot of seafood. So I'm covered. I'm sure nothing bad is happening in the supply chains of all of the chicken and pork and beef that I eat.

I'm sure everything is perfectly fine and nothing bad is happening. Yeah, we'll go with that. Josh, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through this. Thank you very much for, you know, paying attention to it and getting the word out there about what's actually happening. That's all for this episode of Angry Planet. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gould, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell.

It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, go to angry planetpod.com, where for $9 a month, you get access to the Angry Planet Discord, you get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, and you get bonus episodes. Two pretty good ones kicking around over there right now. One about Fallout and the other about Russian convict troops and their impact on the communities that they return to once their sentence on the front line is done. It's pretty great. Again, that's at angry planetpod.com. Shout out to everyone who's stuck around for the past week and a half. I had a rather, I had rather pressing personal matters I had to attend to.

So the pod fell off there for a minute, but we are back and we will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.