We are a couple of miles off the South Carolina coast, and Captain Kerry Abraham is dangling from an outrigger 50 feet beyond the starboard gunwale of the Miss Kathy. For ten minutes, he has been trying to disentangle a braided steel cable as thick as my thumb and so taut the wind whistles through it. With its massive metal beams, gears, chains, and levers, a shrimp trawler is like a piece of heavy construction equipment, except that it also rocks, sways, heaves, and lurches. Abraham is about to be dunked into the turbid ocean. Then the 78-foot-long ship rolls and catapults him almost vertically overhead. Not for the first time, it strikes me that it helps to be a little bit crazy if you are a commercial shrimp fisherman.
When I boarded the Miss Kathy one morning last August, it was my final stop on a quest that had been far more difficult than I had expected: I wanted to find a shrimp that I could eat with both gusto and good conscience. Bright orange, glistening, and hooked over the rim of a cocktail glass, shrimp were my first “luxury” food. But sometime in the mid-1980s, just as our love affair was settling into a steady relationship, shrimp jilted me. A bag from the local supermarket was fine one week, and reeked of ammonia the next, with a peculiar muddy aftertaste.
Today, the average American eats four pounds of shrimp per year, double what we ate in the 1990s. This is at least in part because these little crustaceans are cheaper and more plentiful than ever before. Supermarket freezer cases overflow with bags from Mexico, Ecuador, China, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. But the vast majority of the shrimp we eat today are no longer wild and netted from unpolluted ocean waters by men like Kerry Abraham. Instead, they’re grown in crowded, murky, man-made ponds in developing countries—which may go a long way toward explaining why they often taste like bottom-feeding farmed fish.
By the time I noticed this change in flavor, the industry had grown into one of the most destructive means by which humans produce food. Shrimp farmers started by clear-cutting vast coastal fringes of mangroves—crucial breeding grounds for fish—to create ponds. As rotting shrimp carcasses and uneaten shrimp food polluted estuaries and bays, farmers hacked down more trees and built more ponds. Captive shrimp eat animal protein, and back then as many as four pounds of fish were needed to produce a single pound of shrimp, and that didn’t count the loss of aquatic life from pollution and habitat destruction. Jason Clay, a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund, succinctly summed up the problem with this type of aquaculture: “Fish are the only carnivores consumed in any quantity by people.”
Captive shrimp are notoriously susceptible to viral and bacterial epidemics, and in response, farmers have deployed an arsenal of more than 20 antibiotics and pesticides. Chloramphenicol, a potent antibiotic banned for use in animals in the United States in 1986, became the drug of choice in parts of Asia, even though humans exposed to minuscule quantities can suffer the fatal blood disease aplastic anemia, among other adverse affects. There is no known level at which chloramphenicol is safe. Because of all these problems, Seafood Watch, a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium that monitors fisheries for sustainability, puts foreign-farmed shrimp in its “Avoid” category. The better choice, according to the group, is American wild shrimp.
But Kerry Abraham and the 13,000 other Americans who earn a living from wild shrimp are having trouble making ends meet. In 2004, the Commerce Department accused China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Brazil, and Ecuador of dumping cheap shrimp into the United States and imposed tariffs on them. Still, foreign production continued to surge, and the tariffs failed to stem the price free fall. Between 2000 and 2005, the average price South Carolina shrimpers received for their catches dropped from nearly $4 a pound to just $2.59. “I’ll be able to hold on because I have my own dock and freezers and sell directly to my customers,” said Abraham, who at the age of 52 has no intention of changing careers. “I’ve been shrimping since I was eight. Bought my first boat at seventeen. It’s all I know.”
For the moment, he has solved the more immediate problem. With a loud thwack, the hung-up cable springs free, and the net fans out in the Miss Kathy’s wake, forming an opening 100 feet across before disappearing beneath the milky brown water. The next two hours pass tranquilly. Abraham sits behind the wheel in the pilot house and steers a straight, slow course. Joseph Aiken, one of his hands, fries up eggs and sausage in the galley. James Stanley Golden, the other crewman, snoozes in his bunk. On deck, the day is clear and hot. Porpoises surf on our bow wave. Gulls and pelicans perch on every available inch of rigging, wearing expectant looks. The quiet grumble of the engines is the only thing breaking the silence.
Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. On the back deck, Aiken and Golden tug lines and activate winches, skip-roping over chains and cables. The net is cranked in on rollers the size of tractor tires. A slimy avalanche of what looks like formless aquatic protoplasm spews onto a counter-height platform near the stern. Jellyfish predominate, but there are also crabs, rays, starfish, immature sharks, spadefish, flounder, silver eels, mackerel, and whiting. With rapid, practiced movements, Aiken and Golden sink their hands into the mass and pluck out shrimp, tossing them into bushel-size plastic baskets, which fill in a matter of minutes. The rest of the net’s contents—mostly dead—they scrape over the stern, much to the delight of the screeching and diving seabirds.
This “by-catch,” the unintended species caught and killed along with the quarry, constitutes the most serious environmental complaint against shrimp trawling in the United States. As disturbing as the sight of this loss of life is, it turns out that the largest single-species component of Abraham’s by-catch is cannonball jellyfish, which, if anything, are too common, according to Megan Westmeyer, coordinator of the South Carolina Aquarium’s Sustainable Seafood Initiative. “Studies of commercially important fin fish off the South Atlantic seaboard have shown that by-catch is not affecting those populations,” she said.
That wasn’t always the case. Until the 1990s, a boat could take as much as ten pounds of by-catch—everything from sea turtles to sea urchins—for every pound of shrimp. By adding excluding devices to their nets (essentially holes that allow unwanted animals to escape), fishermen have reduced their by-catch by more than half. Atlantic coast fishermen like Abraham have done better than that, driving their fin fish by-catch down to two pounds per pound of shrimp. Fisheries for small “cocktail” shrimp off the northern Atlantic and Pacific coasts have by-catch rates of less than one-tenth of a pound for every pound of shrimp.
Even in a perfect world, though, wild catches, which total 200 million pounds a year, will be able to supply only a fraction of the 1.4 billion pounds of shrimp Americans eat each year. The rest will inevitably come from farms. Fortunately, it seems that shrimp farmers are mending their ways. Today, most new shrimp farms are situated away from mangroves. By adding soy to feed and adopting mechanical feeding systems, food conversion ratios have dropped to about two pounds of fish for every pound of shrimp. But problems remain. Even though enforcement is spotty—only two out of 100 seafood shipments coming into the United States get inspected—FDA and EU examiners continue to find residual chloramphenicol in imported shrimp.
Captain Kerry Abraham
One pioneering company, OceanBoy Farms, is proving that shrimp can be raised sustainably. Clewiston, Florida, in the heart of sugarcane country, seems like a counterintuitive site for the head offices of a state-of-the-art aquaculture operation. For starters, the nearest drop of seawater is more than 60 miles away. The ruler-straight road leading south of town bisects undulating green fields stretching from horizon to horizon. Here and there, I pass a herd of grazing cows, or an alligator lolling in the sun on the bank of a ditch.
From the highway, OceanBoy Farms looks like a garden center—several dozen greenhouses and a cluster of modular outbuildings surrounded by an imposing chain-link fence. At the front gate, I sign a document titled “Bio-security Protocols,” then slosh through a shoe wash of germ-killing sodium hydrochlorite on my way to a station where I wash my hands in disinfectant soap. Finally, I wiggle into a white plastic bio-security suit, looking for all the world as though I’m setting out for a space walk.
By maintaining a scrupulously clean environment, OceanBoy avoids all drugs, chemicals, hormones, and preservatives. In the greenhouses, 2,000 healthy adult shrimp produce juveniles that are transferred to outdoor ponds, where they grow to market size in six months. Water is pumped from a slightly saline aquifer, and then completely recycled. The shrimp receive feed based mostly on organic soybeans. What fish protein they do get comes from tilapia that OceanBoy also raises and feeds with naturally occurring algae.
Dr. David Z. McMahon, founder and chief science officer of the seven-year-old company, expects to produce only about 4 million pounds of shrimp this year. They sell for about twice the going price—enough to make a profit. But it is technology, not seafood, that may become OceanBoy’s most important export. “We probably have a hundred scientists visit us every year from around the world,” says McMahon. “Since we have shown how shrimp can be grown in a sustainable, environmentally friendly manner away from saltwater, nearly every major new project worldwide has moved inland.”
In the company kitchen, I sample an OceanBoy shrimp. It is good-looking—deep orange and milky white—and firm-fleshed and sweet. According to McMahon, a panel of experts taking part in a blind tasting at the University of Florida’s Aquatic Food Products Lab preferred them over wild shrimp. But I miss that little wild oomph. Rick Bayless, the well-known Chicago restaurateur, has long been a fan of OceanBoy shrimp. “They have a clean, clear taste that works very well in ceviches and seafood cocktails. They take on other flavors nicely. But they don’t have the flavor of wild shrimp.”
American shrimp fishermen hope to use that distinctive flavor as their last, great hope for survival in a world awash in cheap farmed imports. Taking a page from the successful campaign of Alaska’s wild salmon fishermen, shrimpers have initiated a program aimed at convincing consumers that their catch is worth paying more for. “You have one animal swimming all its life in the ocean, eating all the wonderful things God provides. You’ve got another animal that lives in a pond, not swimming a lot, and eating man-made food, mostly soy-based,” said Eddie Gordon, executive director of Wild American Shrimp Inc., a marketing firm based in Charleston, South Carolina.
It would be hard to think up a better marketing campaign than inviting a few chefs and supermarket seafood buyers over to Kerry Abraham’s house down on the shores of St. Helena Island for some of the Frogmore stew he served me the night before we went fishing. Abraham is one of those southern cooks congenitally incapable of preparing a dish that serves fewer than 20. He moves around the kitchen with the same familiarity he displays aboard his boat: shucking just-picked ears of sweet corn, chopping links of hard sausage like a trained chef, pulling a half-dozen bags of fresh shrimp out of the fridge. A big aluminum pot on the stove wafts steam that is fragrant with a peppery boiling mixture whose ingredients Abraham coyly declines to reveal. Friends pop in. His wife, the real-life Miss Kathy, comes home from a day’s work at the doctors’ office she manages in Beaufort. The three repairmen who successfully replaced the air conditioner’s fan motor are cajoled into filling their own plates. Two big ice chests on the front porch supply enough cold canned beer for all. As the sun sets, St. Helena Sound turns the color of brushed stainless steel. Someone passes around a half-gallon of “brown likker.” The din of laughter, stories, and gossip fills the house as I head back to the kitchen for my third (or is it my fourth?) helping of what just may be the best mess of shrimp on the planet.
At five o’clock the next morning, Abraham hollers for me to get out of bed and into the boat. On balance, I can’t say I feel any qualms. At least not about what I have eaten.
Buyer’s Guide to Shrimp
Despite the improvements the industry is making, securing environmentally sustainable shrimp can still require a bit of legwork. It can also be a little confusing, because there is no system of standards that applies to all shrimp.
If you are looking for a general rule of thumb, follow the advice of Seafood Watch: “Shrimp from the United States are generally good alternatives to imported sources.” Pink shrimp from the West Coast (a small but tasty “salad” species) and spot prawns earn the organization’s “Best” rating; shrimp from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico are considered “Good.” Imported shrimp, whether farmed or trawled, are rated “Avoid.”
An updated list of sources for Certified Wild American shrimp can be found at wildamericanshrimp.com. In the South and East, Wal-Mart and supermarkets such as A&P, Albertsons, Super One, and Kroger carry wild American shrimp, but they are not available at all times at all locations.
Tracking down OceanBoy shrimp can be even harder, because the company produces only between July and December, and the supply quickly runs out. When available, the shrimp can be ordered through Costco. —B.E.