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Posted on 05/18/2008 7:25:23 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
The images and stories are not pleasant: shrimp raised overseas, en masse in stagnant ponds pumped full of antibiotics so the shellfish won’t die from their own filth.
Even more unpleasant: Untold numbers of potentially harmful shrimp make their way into American markets, with labels such as “Gulf shrimp” and “New Orleans shrimp” that belie their true origins.
The domestic shrimp industry, reeling from high fuel prices and cheap imports that now make up 90 percent of the shrimp consumed in the United States, has a delicate balancing act. It wants to educate consumers about imports without scaring them away from shrimp altogether.
The industry is pressuring the federal government to revamp the way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspects shipments — only a tiny fraction are inspected, much less tested — and some in the industry want new laws requiring better disclosure of the origins of seafood.
If a foreign supplier refuses entry to American inspectors, the FDA has no legal authority to deny imports from that supplier, said Michael Taylor, a former FDA policy commissioner and professor of health policy at George Washington University.
“The legal tools they have for imports were enacted in 1938, and they are just way, way out of date for the globalized food supply that we have today,” Taylor said. “It’s just shamefully out of date, and Congress needs to fix that.”
A Thin Line
The FDA has standards for imported seafood, but even if it did have legal authority to inspect every foreign supplier, government audits reveal the FDA is spread so thin that foreign firms can send potentially harmful seafood to the United States almost at will.
The FDA has banned chloramphenicol, an antibiotic known to cause aplastic anemia, a serious blood disease in humans.
Other markets such as the European Union have found chloramphenicol in shrimp imported from China and Vietnam, resulting in bans of certain imports.
The FDA has not.
In 2002, during the most recent independent audit of the agency’s oversight of seafood imports, the FDA was doing laboratory tests of just 1.2 percent of seafood products entering U.S. ports.
When tests did uncover problems, the reaction was so slow that the food made it to market anyway.
“Even when FDA investigators had recommended immediate detention of imported seafood shipments ... the agency did not take this action because its policy is to first forward all recommendations to headquarters for review,” the auditors from the U.S. General Accounting Office reported.
FDA took an average of 348 days to alert port-of-entry personnel about serious safety problems identified with seafood products from six foreign firms.
“The only real line of defense is that import inspection, which is a very thin line,” Taylor said.
Name Game
So what are shrimp lovers to do?
The U.S. Department of Commerce wants them to buy American. It gave grants to a coalition of shrimpers in coastal states, from Texas to North Carolina, to establish Wild American Shrimp Inc. The multistate marketing group touts the differences between shrimp caught in the Atlantic Ocean and those coming from farms overseas, and it certifies some products sold in stores.
It also warns consumers to be savvy about labels.
“New Orleans shrimp has nothing to do with coming from Louisiana,” said Deborah Long, a spokeswoman for the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “It means New Orleans style. There’s Cajun spices on the shrimp.”
Federal law requires country-of-origin labeling on seafood sold at retail. But the same rules don’t apply to restaurants.
Lawmakers in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have introduced bills aimed at tightening the rules, which have always drawn staunch opposition from restaurant associations, even deep in Cajun country, where shrimp is a matter of pride.
On May 6 in Baton Rouge, for the first time in nearly a decade, a seafood disclosure bill made it to the full House for debate, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.
The bill was expanded to include shrimp, but restaurant lobbyists succeeded in removing the threat of jail and adding the provision that a restaurant must inform customers of shellfish origins only if asked.
Bittersweet
The industry is even recruiting well-known chefs, such as Emeril Lagasse, to tout differences in taste.
Mike Haby, a shrimp industry expert at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, has published a scientific paper showing how the diet of wild shrimp translates into sweetness on the palate.
“They have a great flavor as a result of their diet,” Haby said. “But you want to make sure (of the origin of the shrimp). Much of the pond shrimp is absolutely visually perfect, and we eat with our eyes.”
But winning arguments on taste, health and stronger regulations won’t do anything to stop the biggest problem threatening American shrimpers in the long term: high fuel prices.
Even tariffs have had, at best, only a moderate effect on imports, and they have been controversial.
“I think some of the criticism of the trade actions is that people might have mistaken it as a panacea — that if you had duties imposed, it would restore prices,” Long said. “That was never its intention. The most hope that the industry has is all of these issues coming together to raise awareness in the consumer market.”
Even then, it may be hard to convince Americans under a struggling economy to pay a premium price for what’s presented as a premium product.
Richard Moore, who advocates the cause of local shrimpers from his office at Hillman’s Seafood Market in Dickinson, sees no end to their troubles.
The American shrimp fleet is aging, and few newcomers will forge a career that, for now, shows so little promise. Those remaining look toward an uncertain retirement.
“It’s a little old for them to start doing brain surgery or rocket science or something like that,” Moore said. “They’re stuck. They’ve got a $50,000 to $80,000 boat that nobody wants. It’s what they’ve done all their life. Where the hell do they go?”
They just need a way to brand the shrip “Organic” and they can double the price.
never mexican, chinese, malaysian, indonesian, korean etc....
Another reason why I never touch seafood. Maybe people will come to their senses and stop wasting huge amounts of money on crustations and begin eating real food.
Bad timing there JR as we were going to grill shrimps next weekend and it’s too late to order Allan Bros Steaks...
I live in Missouri and I eat no shrimp, except what I consume on vacation to coastal Ga. and La. There the local resturaunts serve local shrimp. The chains and hotel/high end resturaunts serve imported shrimp. Same with oysters and other shellfish. For the price, the quality sucks compared to the local cook shacks we seek out.
I always buy the local, frozen shrimp in the coastal areas to bring home in the cooler. A few pounds of shrimp goes a long way towards tyin me over till my next visit.
I agree, fresh Key West pink shrimp are excellent.
Visions of a report some time ago - “shrimp” farms in China. The shrimp were grown in stagnant ponds with chicken pens suspended over the ponds. With chickens raised above, and the waste product dropping below, the farm had solved multiple problems - no disposal issues for the chicken litter, and the shrimp didn’t need to be fed...
>> “It’s just shamefully out of date, and Congress needs to fix that.”
I’m afraid they’ll be too busy kicking Rove’s ass.
A 12v battery, an old car head light, a long handled net and we’re off to catch our own locally. No worries about tainted imports.
Have you had Alaskan spot prawns? If you get to the NW you should try them.
wishing I could get nice mega prawns
Agree to tastes bad and has mercury.
I used to love eating shrimp in (higher quality) Chinese restaurants until a few years ago, when I began to get an upset stomach almost every time. Then these types of stories started to come out, and everything suddenly made sense. I think we’ve got a real problem with imported food from the Third World, and now that America has become a net importer of food, it’s likely to get worse.
....”Other markets such as the European Union have found chloramphenicol in shrimp imported from China and Vietnam, resulting in bans of certain imports.”
I note the “China and Vietnam” mention in the article, but seems to me the “China” label is actually “Thailand”.
Can anyone confirm this? I am going by my own package label reading experience as I shop for seafood. I don’t find much of anything as “Product of China”, only as “Product of Thailand” and “farm raised” as though to fool us fools. (Tilapia, Cod, and Shrimp)
Most of what I’ve been finding (seafood) actually labeled “Product of China” is also labeled “Wild Caught”. Logically the “Wild Caught” would mean not “Farm Raised”, thus safe to consume, but then is it really “Wild Caught”, or just a BS label? With only 1.2% F.D.A. inspection due understaffing, how can it be proven to be “Wild Caught”?
We will buy imported seafood except from Thailand, China, or Viet Nam as there are too many questions unanswered, and virtually no oversight from our own Government our taxes go to pay for.
We love our seafood. Don’t want to give it up, so we shop carefully for ours.
Used to have one of the Gulfs largest fleets about 35 miles from here. With the implementation of TED's, they moved to Mexico.
Last week when we went shopping I looked for large shrimp to grill. All of the shrimp packages were marked China or Taiwan etc.
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