Bad Shrimp

I'll be the first to admit that I like shrimp. I prefer wild caught but I sometimes by the frozen farm raised bags o' shrimp at Trader Joe's because it is convenient and it's nice to have a little shrimp on hand in the freezer for a quick stir fry. I probably won't be buying the farm raised shrimp again. I know it doesn't taste as good as wild caught and the texture is not as good but I thought that had more to do with the freezing than being farm raised....evidently I was mistaken. Farm raising shrimp is not a very nice thing and the product is more than likely tainted with something whether it be antibiotics or some chemical...evidently you pretty much can't grow shrimp without loads of chemicals and antibiotics. Yes, the FDA inspects and tests imported shrimp but only 2% if it and what it does test it finds is tainted.

Jill at La Vida Locavore exerpts from a book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe:

Here are some shrimp facts from the book:

• In 2006, Americans ate 1.3 billion lbs of shrimp, or 4.4 lbs per person.
  
• As bad as shrimp farming is, wild-caught shrimp are pretty awful too: for every one pound of shrimp caught by trawler, they kill and throw away 10 pounds of "bycatch" (other species they weren't fishing for).
  
• Chain restaurants favor the uniformity of farmed shrimp over wild-caught shrimp, which can be more varied.
  
• 85% of shrimp sold in the U.S. is imported.
  
• 3/4 of the world's shrimp production comes from developing nations like Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and China.
  
• China's the top producer of shrimp, followed by Thailand.
  
• China supplies 70% of the planet's farmed fish.
  
• In the U.S. one in every five fish is from China.
  
• For each pound of farmed shrimp, it takes two pounds of wild-caught fish flesh. These are ground up and turned into pellets.
  
• Shrimp have been turned into cannibals. A major ingredient in the pellets they eat is ground-up shrimp heads.
  
• Individual shrimp farmers rarely do well financially, facing low prices for shrimp, high feed costs, and high risk of being wiped out by disease.
  
• Shrimp farms do not effectively create jobs. In India an acre of rice paddy can employ 14 people but an acre of shrimp ponds employs 1.
  
• Plants that process farmed shrimp hire many workers to behead and devein shrimp. In India, these workers make (on average) $35/month.
  
• "In Louisiana, which does rigorous testing of its own, the antibiotic chloramphenicol, known to cause leukemia and aplastic anemia, was found in nine percent of all samples." - p. 159
  
• Mangroves, which are being destroyed by shrimp farming, form a natural barrier against hurricanes and tsunamis. They "are among the most productive ecosystems on earth, as well as the most efficient carbon sinks we know of." - p. 160
  
• "38% of mangrove loss worldwide can be attributed to shrimp farming." - p. 160
  
• "In Ecuador, a major supplier of farmed shrimp to American chain restaurants, almost 70 percent of mangroves have been razed since the coming of shrimp farms." - p. 160
  
• In 1990, a flesh-eating virus spread from Mexican shrimp farms to wild blue shrimp, wiping out the blue shrimp in the upper Gulf of California.
  
• "An epidemic of antibiotic-resistant cholera has been documented among Ecuadorean shrimp farm workers." - p. 164

If I were you I would, like me, rethink my shrimp eating habits.