Today, Explained - America’s shellfish behavior

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Americans consume more shrimp than salmon and tuna combined. But where’s it all coming from? Listen to this episode of Gastropod before you throw another shrimp on the barbie this Memorial Day. Gastropod is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. This episode is co-hosted by Nicola Twilley and Cynthia Graber. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Memorial Day! Maybe you're having a barbecue? And if you are, maybe you're gonna throw some shrimp on the barbie? Hi Barbie! Hi Barbie! Hi Barbies! Hi Barbie! Hi Barbies!

Fun fact! Americans eat more shrimp than any other seafood. We eat, on average, about six pounds of shrimp per person. We eat more shrimp than the next two most popular seafoods combined. That's more shrimp than tuna and salmon together. That's a lot of shrimp. Go get you some lobsters and shrimp. But how did shrimp get so big? And where's all that shrimp coming from? And should you be eating so much of it? Those are not today explained questions.

Those are gastropod questions. And while today explained enjoys this federal holiday, gastropod is going to bring you the answers. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Today explained, but it's not.

What it is is a holiday, so we're bringing you an episode of Gastropod about what you might be cooking up today. Here's Cynthia Graber and Nicole Twilley with the heads and tails on big shrimp. When author Paul Greenberg was a kid in the 70s and 80s, there was an ad on TV from a local chain restaurant called Beefsteak Charlie's. Contrary to what you might expect, Beefsteak Charlie's big draw was actually unlimited shrimp. I found the old commercial, and it's this couple comes into Beefsteak Charlie's, and they go, oh, shrimp, oh, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. Oh, shrimp.

Shrimp, shrimp. And they get themselves into a lather, and all shrimp. Oh, shrimp. Shrimp, shrimp. And they get themselves into a lather and all they're saying is shrimp again and again and again. Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. Pretty much captures how the majority of Americans then and now feel about shrimp, which translates to yes, please, more please. But this utopia of endless shrimp in which we now live, it's a pretty recent upgrade to American life. I would say if you were to look 50 years ago,

shrimp certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the top five seafoods consumed. There wasn't even a commercial shrimp industry in America till relatively recently. Big shrimp got started in the late 1800s with dried shrimp. Some of the earliest shrimp fishermen in the United States were Chinese immigrants who came to San Francisco Bay and they pursued a shrimp that was native to San Francisco Bay, dried those shrimp, and sent them back to China. Bay Area shrimp got pretty much fished out and the waters were also polluted during the gold rush. And so Asian immigrants moved to the Gulf of Mexico to take advantage of all the shrimp that thrive there.

The shrimp they dried and shipped overseas was the first commercial shrimp industry in the Gulf of Mexico, but it was pretty small and seasonal. It wasn't until the early 1900s, when food in tin cans really caught on, that the Gulf shrimp went national. But to most Americans, especially those who didn't live along the coast, shrimp were still pretty weird. Shrimp were being canned and shipped out to American households from Gulf states like Louisiana and Mississippi. But inland Americans had no idea what to do with these odd bug-like crustaceans. The seafood marketers in the Gulf of Mexico really made a push to try and get people to eat shrimp. And that's when the shrimp cocktail really emerges as this kind of national fancy food. It was the Jazz Age and everyone was wearing cocktail dresses while they sipped cocktails out of cocktail glasses in cocktail lounges.

And shrimp canners marketed the shrimp cocktail as the height of sophistication. After World War II, other technologies improved that allowed shrimp to be frozen and transported, and so fresh-tasting shrimp could be used in cocktails, not canned shrimp. But the shrimp cocktail itself remained super ritzy. I remember I had one friend, her father worked for MetLife, and they would have these big cocktail parties, and they would serve shrimp cocktail. And the score of all scores was to get an invite to my friend Andrea's father's MetLife shrimp parties and get your hands on some MetLife shrimp. MetLife shrimp parties sound fantastic, but behind the scenes, things were not so pretty. By the 70s and 80s, Gulf shrimp fishermen had a well-deserved, terrible

reputation for killing sea turtles that got caught in their nets, as well as a ton of other fish. It all got thrown out as bycatch. The government and environmental groups worked with shrimp fishermen. Together, they designed and refined nets that kept out sea turtles and most of the non-shrimp fish that were collateral damage. But the early designs also kept a lot of shrimp out of the nets. It's very controversial. I sit on the shrimp task force and, you know, it was a big fight to try and stop these turtle excluder devices. Lance Nasio is a shrimper in Louisiana, and he was involved in testing and then redesigning

the nets. There weren't a lot of other shrimpers willing to work with him at first. They thought they were going to be put out of business, you know, because when they first came out with it, there was a lot more shrimp loss. John Fallon is the director of sustainability and coastal conservation for the Audubon Nature Institute. He says cleaning up the Gulf shrimp fishing business took decades. We've seen them make the effort because they don't want to harm turtles. And it worked. Turtle numbers went up. John told us that Gulf shrimping became a truly sustainable fishery. Finally, that ritzy shrimp cocktail was ethical as well as sophisticated. But while all of this was going on in the Gulf of Mexico, something was being invented half a world away that was

set to turn the entire shrimp industry on its head. Asian shrimp farming. For thousands of years, especially in Asia, shrimp-loving people had been doing what they could to make shrimp more plentiful and easy to catch. Basically, they looked at where shrimp were already abundant. Shrimps spend part of their lives along the coast in swamps. In Asia, they're often found in mangrove forests, these swampy forests with trees that have roots that look like knobby knees poking out of the water. People cleared out small ponds in the mangroves where they'd feed baby shrimp with food scraps and use fences and nets to keep out predators and keep in the shrimp. It wasn't really shrimp farming, more like shrimp ranching, and the shrimp were definitely still on their own when it came to breeding. But that all changed starting in 1930.

The first place that it happened was in Japan with this creature that was called the Kuruma prawn. These particular shrimp were famous for being used in a dish called dancing shrimp, where they were doused with alcohol, and when that alcohol was set on fire, the shrimp wiggled and looked like they were dancing. It was a pricey dish, and those shrimp were quite valuable, so there was a financial incentive to figuring out how to raise them on a farm. But the costs of all the R&D required to actually farm shrimp successfully were also pretty high. It took decades just to figure out how to get shrimp to spawn in captivity.

Before this one Japanese scientist, Dr. Motosako Fujinaga, got going with his research, no one even knew what shrimp larvae looked like, much less what to feed them. Dr. Fujinaga figured out that shrimp need to eat different foods at different life stages. This breakthrough meant farmers could raise them in captivity. But for a long time, no one could figure out how to get them to make sweet shrimp love and new shrimp babies. I don't even know how they stumbled upon this, but they found that shrimp have eye stalks. Their eyes are sort of on the end of these stalks. And they figured out that if you clipped off one eye stalk, the shrimp would suddenly become able to reproduce. Finally, after decades of this kind of trial and error,

the mysteries of shrimp farming seem to have been solved. And by the 1990s, shrimp farming in general just took off, which had a pretty immediate impact on what Americans eat. The price certainly plummeted, and the consumption just soared. This is all economics. Take a poor Thai rice farmer. If he switched to farming shrimp instead, he would literally multiply his annual income by about 10. The World Bank immediately seized on shrimp farming as a way

to bring Southeast Asian farmers out of poverty. They started dishing out loans to help them get in on the shrimp farming boom. And then in America, shrimp were making a lot of money for restaurant owners, too. Shrimp had been seen as fancy, highly desirable food. So once the prices plummeted and you could put shrimp on everything, people loved the idea. The new farmed shrimp were half the price of what they'd been before. So restaurant owners could suggest you add shrimp to your pasta for a few extra dollars. They'd still make bank on a 300% markup. It was a golden time for shrimp, and Americans ate it up. Between the 1980s and today, American shrimp consumption quadrupled.

Welcome to the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. All you can eat! All you can eat! Which Americans, like Homer Simpson, took pretty literally. That man ate all our shrimp and two plastic lobsters. But like all bargains, this all-you-can-eat shrimp fiesta was too good to be true in the end. The advertisements go shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, but it should really be mangrove, mangrove, mangrove, mangrove. It turns out that mangroves actually are really important in terms of protecting coasts and providing habitat for lots of fish and other seafood, but they were being destroyed wholesale

to make space for shrimp farms. Over the past few decades, as much as 80% of the mangrove forests in some estuaries were destroyed. Overall, the countries that got heavily into shrimp farming, like Thailand and Vietnam, they lost between a quarter and nearly a half of their mangroves. But the environment isn't the only hidden cost of shrimp farming. People have been getting hurt, too. One important thing to understand is that that in the ocean, shrimp will eat just anything floating around, whether it's plant matter or little bits of dead fish. But in these newfangled shrimp farms, the shrimp can't just graze on seagrass and nibble on whatever floats by. Instead, the farmers feed them frequent servings of ground up fish. And that fish has to be caught. These fish are tiny little forage fish,

and they're caught way out in the middle of the ocean with basically no oversight from any government. Ian Urbina founded an investigative nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean Project, and he's reported on what it's like to work on one of those fishing boats. This is straight out of Dickens. You know, this is like something of a different century. These boats, they have a lot of child labor. The conditions are dirty. The days are impossibly long, 20 hours. And the workplace itself makes everything about it even worse. These boats are typically filthy. There are lots of machines and sounds and smells and noise. And the ship is constantly pitching and moving all around you, up and down, side to

side. It's super slippery. It's a nightmare. And beatings and violence are fairly commonplace on these vessels. So this is what we're dealing with in some of these fleets. It's a brutality I've never seen in any other industry. They've often paid money to even be able to get jobs like these, and that gets them into something called debt bondage, where they're supposedly working off that debt. In reality, it means they're often not paid and also not allowed to leave. This is basically modern-day slavery. As if that all isn't bad enough, there typically isn't enough fresh food on board,

so vitamin deficiency diseases are common. They don't have antibiotics, so cuts get infected and get gross. It's just unimaginably grim. Ian started reporting on the conditions aboard the fishing boats a decade ago. And at the same time, journalists at The Guardian and at the AP broke a series of stories on the horrors of the shrimp farms themselves on shore in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand. They found the working conditions were abusive and unsafe. There was child labor and some people were subject to modern-day slavery. When the stories broke, Thailand had been a real focus of a lot of those queries and were under a lot of international pressure to reform their labor systems.

Thailand had been the big exporter of shrimp to America, but after all this bad press, the industry moved. These days, the largest portion of shrimp consumed in the U.S. comes from India. That, too, is a pretty recent development. Over a third of the shrimp that Americans eat comes from India. In fact, if you're talking about pre-peeled shrimp, it's a full 60 percent. So did things get better when shrimp farms moved to India? That's coming up after the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos.

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It's the middle of the night. My phone, I get a WhatsApp message from one of the managers who was on site. He's telling me that one of the migrant workers is running through the water treatment portion of the plant. Because there's no security there, the security guard at the main gate wouldn't let her out. So yeah, that was the first red flag. This is a recording that Ian's Outlaw Ocean Project made of the testimony of a guy called Josh Farinella. Josh has been in the seafood industry for more than a decade. He started working at an Indian shrimp processing plant in 2023 as plant manager. And almost right away, he realized things weren't right. Josh contacted Ian and became a

whistleblower, and his story was just released. He reported on what was going on at the plant. He gathered all sorts of documentation for Ian. Josh's evidence showed that labor abuses were the norm in this shrimp processing plant. There was overcrowding, low pay, and some evidence of modern-day slavery. So we'd already been paying 350 rupees a day, 100 rupees a day, less than minimum wage. They work seven days a week. They have not had a day off in over a year now. And they aren't able to just leave on their own. Josh didn't gather any evidence of child labor, but another major report that came out recently called Hidden Harvest by a group called

the Corporate Accountability Lab, they also investigated the cost of shrimp farming in India, and they did find child labor throughout the industry. They also uncovered evidence of workers on shrimp farms handling hazardous chemicals without protective gear, and workers in the processing plants suffering from frostbite and rashes from handling the shrimp all day, again without the right protective equipment. Indian shrimp ends up all over America, at restaurants like Olive Garden, at restaurant suppliers like Cisco and U.S. Foods, and at grocery stores like Kroger's, Safeway, Whole Foods, Walmart, Costco, Aldi, literally everywhere. What's especially messed up about this is that American companies are supposed to make sure that the shrimp they sell meets American standards. As an example, before Aldi buys our

product, they have to verify that we have certain certifications in place. And this should cover everything that you could possibly want covered. That verification takes the form of in-person audits. So why aren't those auditors reporting all these problems? The problem is they only see what you allow them to see. We use two external peeling sheds. They're literally sheds. They're off-site. They're off-site. They are unregulated.

They're generally off the books. Certainly no auditors coming through there. The off-site peeling sheds are totally hidden, and that's where a lot of the work is actually done. The conditions there are horrendous. At Josh's plant, the bathrooms at the off-site sheds had no toilet paper and no running water for workers to wash their hands, and they're handling food. The off-site peeling shed he went to was just open air and kind of because it was summer, it was pretty hot. So it's a hot place, you're having

to peel and you've got to keep up a certain pace for reasons of spoilage. Spoilage and potential food poisoning is one thing, but there's also the problem of illegal antibiotics that are used to keep the shrimp healthy in the overcrowded and dirty ponds they're grown in. Shrimp with antibiotics to the company line would be illegal not to be shipped. In reality, we ship it on a regular basis. This is something we talk about a lot on Gastropod. The overuse of antibiotics in animals for food is helping contribute to antibiotic resistance, and that means the drugs we have to treat diseases don't always work anymore, and people can die. Which is why, in theory, imported food is supposed to be tested for things like antibiotics and other chemicals that comes into Europe is checked for drugs.

So antifungals, antibiotics. In the U.S., less than 1% is checked. And we import more, way more shrimp than Europe does. The story of why the FDA only inspects a frankly shrimp-sized amount of the seafood we import is a whole other saga. But the end result is that Americans are eating shrimp that doesn't meet U.S. safety standards all the time. All of this is shocking, but to be honest, another super depressing thing is that the company that Josh was working at was in the process of applying for, and probably getting approved for, a label called BAP, or Best Aquaculture Practices. And that is meant to imply that they've been held to a higher standard on labor.

But as Ian's reporting and the Hidden Harvest Report show, these kinds of labels clearly don't actually mean very much. The Hidden Harvest Report concluded that labels like this function as, quote, little more than marketing ploys. In the wake of these two recent investigations, Congress is already meeting to talk about the problems with our shrimp supply. But the challenge is that if pressure isn't constant, it's easy for the situation to slide. Ian said this is just what's happening in Thailand.

Thailand began trying to impose a whole bunch of reforms, got a lot of pressure from major Western companies, buyers of seafood, and some seem to be happening. What I hear now is it's all getting rolled back, and that's largely because the attention of media and advocacy has shifted to other places. So this is all bad news for America's shrimp lovers. Meanwhile, back in the Gulf, America's shrimp fishermen have been dealing with this cheap farm shrimp flooding into the country since the 90s, and they've not been super into it. Oh, I mean, well, it ticked them off.

Huge amounts of shrimp poured into the market at very much below the cost of what it takes to bring a wild shrimp to market. This means it's becoming impossible to make it as an American shrimper. Lance Nacio is one of these endangered fishermen. We visited him as he was packing up shrimp that he'd frozen on his boat. These days, Lance often ships directly to consumers and sells at farmers markets. I'm the third generation, and my son is the captain of my boat. He's out right now. He's a fourth generation. So it's a 20-pound box of 1620 plate frozen shrimp. And 1620 means how many shrimp are in a pound. So the smaller the number, the bigger the shrimp. Lance is still fishing for shrimp, but he told us that all around him, his neighbors and former colleagues, they're giving up. What I've seen in my lifetime

of shrimping is that we're losing fishermen, we're losing businesses, we're losing a working waterfront, you know, because we can't sustain it with the cheap dockside prices. Yeah, you know, fishing used to be a multi-generational family business, right? You could pass it down. And what we've really seen over the last, I would say, 10 to 20 years is that that's no longer the case. In some ports, shrimpers say there are 80% fewer boats than there were a couple of decades ago before the cheap imports hit the market. We're not seeing new people enter into the fishery anymore because they don't see much of a future in it or it's financially not feasible. And so really, I would say in the past year, it's the worst I've

ever seen it and it's the worst many have ever seen it. The price for shrimp has been dragged down so low by the farmed product that Gulf shrimpers literally can't sell their catch at that price and still cover their costs. So the restaurants and grocery stores end up buying the cheaper imported shrimp. More than 90% of all shrimp eaten in the U.S. today are imported farm-raised shrimp. Even in New Orleans, which is just over an hour away from where Lance ducks his boat, even in fancy restaurants in the French Quarter, the shrimp that's on almost every menu, it's mostly imported. And this is why Lance's colleagues are quitting. But everyone we spoke to said that if fishermen carry on getting out

of the business at the rate they're quitting right now, it will literally only be a matter of years until there isn't an active shrimp fishery in the Gulf anymore. We're at a really, we're at a breaking point here, where if people don't support this fishery and buy the product, which is the number one thing you can do to help support it, like, I don't know what it's going to look like in another shrimp eaters. Because if there's no Gulf shrimp to buy, then what we're mostly left with is cheap imported shrimp that creates ecological devastation, relies on abusive and even forced labor, and contains chemicals that are illegal and dangerous. Remember that government and environmental groups and shrimpers worked hard for decades to improve the wild Gulf shrimp fishery. The American fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico are regulated. There are only a certain number of shrimpers who are allowed to go out.

The shrimp are monitored to make sure the stocks are still healthy, which they are. The shrimpers follow labor laws. They use all sorts of gear to keep out bycatch and turtles. The result is shrimp you can feel good about eating. John works for Audubon. He's an environmentalist, and he is all in on Gulf shrimp. I would feel very confident in recommending it as a sustainable resource. And we don't lack shrimp, like from a sustainability perspective, like that is a very sustainable fishery in terms of the

biology. We pride ourselves on having well-managed, sustainable fisheries. You don't have a fishery if there are no fishermen. They have to be able to sustain their jobs and their market, or else what are you doing this for? You've been listening to an episode of Gastropod. On Today Explained, you can find Gastropod most places that feature podcasts. Gastropod, as you heard today, covers food through the lens of science and history. Recent episodes also cover the legal battles

over stuffed crust and the science behind Ozempic. Check them out. Thanks for listening.