Cheap (28 page)

 

 

 

IN NEW ENGLAND
, seafood is king. People here think nothing of burning through a gallon of gas to drive to a plate of fried clams, or two gallons for a great lobster roll. We argue tirelessly over whether to add potatoes to clam chowder and whether Wellfleet oysters beat those from Dama riscotta, Maine. But we tend not to bicker about shrimp, which we buy mostly in bags, frozen solid. We have every reason to assume that those bags are filled with crustaceans pulled out of the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas, Louisiana, or Florida. But those of us who scan the fine print on the bag learn—perhaps to our surprise—that that is not the case. The American shrimp industry all but collapsed a decade ago under the weight of imports from Latin America and Asia. Spiting the laws of supply and demand, shrimp got cheaper as demand for it grew, the price dropping by half between 1980 and 2005 as consumption nearly tripled from 1.4 to 4.1 pounds per person per year. Today, 90 percent of shrimp in the United States is imported. Even if you live in Florida or Texas, the frozen shrimp in your shopping cart most likely came from Thailand.

Unlike potatoes, shrimp was not always cheap. Before the 1980s, few Americans cooked with shrimp, and not many were fortunate enough to eat it in restaurants more than a few times a year. Many of us can still recall it as a delicacy, served in a martini glass with a side of cocktail sauce or folded tenderly into cream sauces. Shrimp was a treat: expensive because it was so devilishly hard to come by. Most shrimp sold in the United States was wild, caught in nets, an arduous job requiring strong backs, keen wits, deep knowledge, diesel fuel, and luck. Cultivation was possible but extremely difficult since farmed shrimp was plagued by deadly viruses.

Eventually, science caught up. Aquaculturists unlocked the secrets of shrimp cultivation, of hatching eggs and coaxing them through the post-larvae stage into childhood. They also learned to curb the spread of viruses with sophisticated filtration and purification systems. Millions of acres of coastal wetlands in Asia and Latin America were cleared to make way for man-made ponds where juvenile shrimp were fattened on nutrient slurries and antibiotics. Shrimp exports skyrocketed, and prices plummeted.

Today, shrimp is no longer a delicacy. Wal-Mart is the world’s fastest-growing shrimp importer. Food services giant Sysco Corporation buys more than a billion dollars’ worth of seafood a year, much of it in the form of mysterious “shrimp products” distributed to hospitals and schools. If these facts are not evidence enough of the distance shrimp has fallen in the American pantheon of luxury foods, consider this: Since 2001, Americans have eaten more shrimp by weight than canned tuna fish.

As our taste for shrimp has grown, so has the business of farming it: In the past two decades the number of shrimp farms has quintupled in coastal regions and, to a lesser extent, in inland freshwater farming areas. Virtually all the world’s farmed shrimp is cultivated in the global south, where most of the world’s poor live, too. Slightly less than half of that farmed shrimp is exported to the United States, the world’s leading importer.

At restaurants, shrimp is a no-brainer. Easy to cook, easy to eat, it’s an almost foolproof crowd pleaser. Darden Restaurants, the world’s largest full-service restaurant company, is the parent company of Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, and Red Lobster, all front-runners in the casual dining category. The most popular dishes at Bahama Breeze are fire-cracker shrimp and coconut shrimp. At Olive Garden there are grilled garlic shrimp pasta and shrimp scampi. But for dedicated shrimp lovers, Red Lobster’s endless shrimp parade seems by far the best choice. At this writing the deal includes limitless Cajun, popcorn, coconut, or other shrimp specialty, served with a side of potato, rice, or broccoli; a salad or coleslaw; and Red Lobster’s signature “cheddar” biscuits. The cost is $15.99. How much shrimp do diners eat at one sitting? It’s hard to say, but on the unofficial Red Lobster blog, waitstaff trade “you won’t believe this” stories of customers waddling in and demanding twenty orders—more than two hundred shrimp—at a sitting.

Red Lobster was once positioned—and priced—at the high end of the casual dining category, a place a young couple might go to toast a special anniversary, or a family to fete a new graduate. But in 2001 when the economy softened and customer numbers fell, the chain fought back with a line of menu selections priced under $10. That list included twenty-two items, mostly chicken, pasta, and farm-raised shrimp. Half of Red Lobster’s annual $90 million in seafood sales that year was farm-grown, and 80 percent of that was shrimp. Most of that shrimp was shipped, frozen in blocks, from Thailand.

If there is a heaven for shrimp, it almost certainly looks like Thailand. The country’s 2,700 miles of warm, protected coastline is an ideal habitat for both wild and domesticated species. Shrimp hatch in the ocean, drift toward land with the tides, and get tangled in roots and sediment on the shoreline, where, safe from predators, they grow into juveniles and then return to open water to further mature. Thais have farmed shrimp for centuries on a very small scale, taking advantage of the creature’s natural life cycle by holding it safe in coastal ponds until harvest. Shrimp was also farmed in alternate seasons from rice in paddies, again on a relatively small scale. None of this changed the landscape or made much of a difference in the quality of the shrimp. But it didn’t make for high efficiencies, either. Shrimp was still a luxury.

In the late 1970s, shrimp farmers turbocharged the age-old shrimp-farming process by adding to their ponds post-larval shrimp caught in the wild or raised in hatcheries. They supplemented natural feeds with nutrient slurries, chemicals, and antibiotics. Efficiencies skyrocketed, and the shrimp rush was on.

The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and other lenders poured hundreds of millions of dollars into shrimp, as did private investors. Racked with debts, the Thai government encouraged this development. By the mid-1980s farmers up and down the Thai peninsula had converted their rice paddies—and thousands of square acres of coastline—into teeming shrimp operations, veritable seafood gold mines. While traditional shrimp farms yielded less than 450 pounds per acre, the new factory-style outfits harvested as much as 89,000 pounds per acre. Production grew and then exploded—from 33,000 metric tons in 1987 to an astonishing 240,000 metric tons in 1995.

Shrimp farming was cheered by the World Bank and others as a surefire path out of poverty, and for some it was: Shrimp was substantially more profitable than rice and other crops, and not a few farmers got rich. But the party didn’t last long. As corporate and government interests took tighter hold, pushing demands higher, ponds started to break down and fail. What followed was ruinous debt, environmental degradation, horrifying human rights abuses, and violence that left millions destitute. It was almost as if the shrimp itself was taking revenge for being diminished to the status of a cheap commodity.

Shrimp comes in hundreds of varieties, only a few of which can be tamed. On Thai farms, warm water types dominate—notably Pacific white shrimp,
P. vannamei.,
and black tiger shrimp,
P. monodon
. White shrimp tend to be small, but tigers are the largest shrimp on record, some behemoths weighing in at just under three ounces each. To grow them, coastal or other farmland is swamped or flooded with salt water, to create a brackish pond, and surrounded by a slippery blue plastic apron to prevent frisky shrimp from escaping. (Yes, shrimp can jump.) Some inland farmers truck salt water in from the coast, while others just dump salt into freshwater ponds. Under the best conditions, these ponds are well tended, adequately monitored, and not too tightly packed. More typically, the ponds are dangerously overcrowded and indifferently managed, plagued by overfeeding, plankton blooms, and inadequate water circulation. Shrimp are carnivorous and require feed—usually fish meal—in amounts more than double their adult weight. Often, groundwater aqui fers, domestic water supplies, and adjacent rice paddies and farm fields are contaminated with this meal and with massive volumes of waste from the shrimp itself. Waste water pumped from ponds pollutes canals, rivers, and other water sources with pesticides, antibiotics, and disinfectants. Built-up waste mixed with chemicals scraped from the bottom of the ponds is piled into ugly—and toxic—hillocks. The smell of the shrimp ponds has been likened to a hobbyist’s fish tank that hasn’t been cleaned in months. Beneath the smell lurks disease: As with any creatures in extremely crowded and filthy conditions, farmed shrimp are highly susceptible to infection, and despite massive inputs of antibiotics, many sicken and die. As a result, roughly half of the more than million acres of shrimp farms lie abandoned. Meanwhile, the land is permanently contaminated. Paddies tainted by salt and filth are no good for growing rice or much of anything else. And on the coast the same mangrove forests that once sheltered and nourished wild shrimp have been systematically eradicated to make way for the farmed variety.

The mangrove forest is a unique and irreplaceable tropical ecosystem and a star player in the natural history of Thailand. Stretching down roughly half of the country’s coastline, the mangrove is thick with nutrients for fish and shellfish, and offers shelter from predators. Life in the world’s coral reefs and sea grass beds—from which two-thirds of all fish are caught—rely on a critical synergy with mangroves. Creatures move back and forth among them, stirred by the winds and tides. But perhaps even more important, mangroves form a transitional buffer between land and sea, stabilizing shorelines, reducing soil erosion, and softening the assaultive impact of tidal waves. Scientists at the Mangrove Ecosystems Research Center in Vietnam have evidence that mangroves work better than concrete walls to hold back the punishing tides of tropical storms. Mangroves are perhaps best appreciated by their absence: On December 26, 2004, the great Southeast Asian tsunami pummeled the coasts of eleven nations with waves twenty feet high, killing more than a quarter of a million people and leaving millions of others homeless. The United Nations reported that clear-cutting of coastal mangrove forests for shrimp production contributed significantly to this tragic outcome.

Cheap shrimp, like all things cheap, require cheap labor. Apparently, too few Thais are willing to work cheaply enough to satisfy our demand for low-priced shrimp because the industry is served mostly by migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The migrants, many of whom do not speak the local language and have little concept of their own rights, suffer egregious and well-documented abuses ranging from unpaid overtime to child labor, torture, and rape. Perhaps it is too big a stretch to link all this suffering and degradation to the $15.99 “all you can eat” shrimp parade at Red Lobster, or perhaps it is just a small step.

Stanford economist Peter Timmer is a measured, thoughtful scholar not given to exaggeration, but when it comes to the global markets, one thing worries him above all else. “I’m quite concerned about what the large food companies are doing to the quality and safety of our diet,” he said. You need not be an economist to realize that food farmed, harvested, and processed in enormous quantities and sold at very low prices is unlikely to have been handled with great care. Lack of care can lead to sloppiness, and sloppiness to contamination, infestation, and infection. More than two hundred known diseases are transmitted by food through viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins, metals, and prions, the protein implicated in a number of fatal neurological disorders including mad cow disease and its lethal human version, a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The less we spend on food, the more likely it is that one or more of these killers will sneak into our food supply.

An estimated 76 million cases of foodborne disease occur each year in the United States, requiring 325,000 hospitalizations and resulting in 5,000 deaths. New surveillance data—and newfound links between food and disease—suggest that these are underestimates. The vast majority of food-related illness goes unreported, and the vast majority of food-related threats are likely to be as yet unknown.

Consider that until the early 1980s few thought that
Escherichia coli
posed a serious problem to human health. The bacterium is ubiquitous and in many ways essential. It resides (among other places) in the human intestine, where it suppresses the growth of harmful bacteria and plays an important role in digestion and vitamin synthesis. Its biological simplicity makes it an excellent model for genetic research, as does its harmlessness. But that is the normal form. Mutated, E. coli can be virulent. E. coli 0157, for example, exudes a powerful toxin that turns on and attacks its host. In humans the toxin attacks the intestine, causing severe stomach cramps, high fever, and debilitating bloody diarrhea. In about 4 percent of cases the toxins enter the bloodstream, where the real damage is done. E. coli 0157 infection is linked to the most common cause of acute kidney failure in children, hemolytic uremic syndrome, and also to seizures, strokes, blindness, and brain damage.

E. coli 0157 was first isolated and characterized in 1982, and since then has been linked to what appear to be an increasing number of foodborne disease outbreaks. In 2006 more than two hundred Californians fell ill and three died after eating Dole-brand bagged baby spinach tainted with the bacterium. The bug was traced to the guts of a wild pig caught rooting around a cattle feed lot. One would think three deaths would be enough to motivate the food industry to change its ways, and perhaps in some ways it was. But the following year, in 2007, there were twenty-one beef recalls nationwide for suspected E. coli contamination, the largest number in five years. The amount of beef recalled—33.4 million pounds—set a new record. A year later, in July 2008, the dangerous strain appeared in hamburger meat packaged and distributed by Nebraska Beef Ltd., purveyor not only to Kroger Supermarkets., but, more surprisingly, to Whole Foods Market, a paragon of the natural foods movement. For reasons no one has fully explained, Whole Foods continued to sell the meat briefly even after the FDA recall. That September the strain appeared in lettuce distributed by Aunt Mid’s Produce in Detroit.