– My wife and I have been growing increasing skeptical of some of the food offered up to us at our local supermarkets. Shrimp is the one that comes to mind. A story here and a story there about shrimp being grown in China in filthy ponds badly contaminated with human waste and then fed large quantities of antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to make it onto our supermarket shelves have turned me off.
– I remember asking pointedly at a Red Lobster restaurant a year or two back about just where their shrimp came from and, apparently, it wasn’t the first time they’d been asked. I got a rather angry response back from our server saying that of course they buy them on the market at the best price they can get – they are, after all, a for-profit restaurant chain. She never actually said, however, if they came from China or not.
– I just went onto Red Lobster’s web site to see what they had to say about where they sourced their shrimp from and what kind of quality control they might have. They have a nice page here ➡ that talks about all the good things they do -but there’s no mention of shrimp here which is, perhaps, a bit worrisome?
– More recently, when my wife and I were discussing this, she told me that she’d asked them at the Trader Joe’s where she shops. They’d quite proudly told her that they were no longer getting their shrimp from China. Now they were sourcing them out of Vietnam.
– And, most recently, in our local Albertson’s Market, I’d come across a little pamplet in the meat section extolling the virtues of Wild American Shrimp. I’d been fascinated and took one home and showed it to my wife.
– She’d asked if I thought these folks, the Wild AmericanShrimp people were fishing responsibly and renewable. I had to say I didn’t know for sure. I’d been to their web site and it said they were fishing in an environmentally conscious way – but how does one really know?
– I’ve got to tell you this, though. After reading the article, below, about how the shrimp are grown in Asia, I’m going to eat Wild American Shrimp or their equivalents – or none at all. Yuk!
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No longer a luxury item, king prawns have become a staple on our supermarket fish counters – but at what price? Alex Renton reports from Vietnam where impoverished producers have adopted some alarming intensive farming practices
There’s no lack of building materials around the prawn ponds of the Mekong Delta. Walls are constructed of the empty plastic sacks of pesticides and prawn feed. It’s cheap, but sweaty. Southern Vietnam is hot and sticky at any time and the humid air inside the Huong family’s one-room hut, perched on a prawn-pond dyke, is rank with chemicals: we cough and sneeze when we enter. There’s an acrid dust all over the mud floor, which makes you worry for little Huong Thi Mai, who is seven, a patient little girl sitting on the low bed near the door watching her parents work. I glance at her bare shins for signs of the skin infections that are common among prawn-farm workers, but she looks OK.
Mr Huong is proud: ‘This is a very modern prawn-farming business,’ he says. And, with luck and four months’ hard labour, it is going to make him and his family quite rich. After they’ve paid their debts, the Huongs hope to buy a moped and their first fridge. Thi Mai might go to a new school. ‘We can have a better life,’ says Mrs Huong. But until the tiger prawns are ready for harvest, and shipped off to Europe or America, the family must live here, keeping a 24-hour watch beside the sour-smelling pond. They’ve borrowed £4,000, a huge sum, to invest in prawn larvae, feed and medicines – and they need to keep alert in case anyone steals the growing crustaceans.
Modernity, for Mr Huong, appears to be chiefly measured in chemicals. I count 13 different pots, jars and sacks of these in the hut, and he eagerly talks me through them. He’s particularly keen on a compound called ‘Super Star’ – the Vietnamese print on the label says it ‘intensifies the metabolism to help prawns grow fat’. He learnt about this additive on a government-run course at the local fishery training centre. ‘We’re not allowed to use much – only 10 bottles per crop,’ he says.
There are other glossy labels – most of them for products made in Thailand, the centre of the world’s prawn farming industry. Mr Huong mixes up a feed in a big white basin while we talk. The basic feed, he says, is soya, broken rice and fish and prawn parts. But in it goes a large dose of ‘Amino-Pro’. ‘It will help the shrimp taste better,’ he says. The label has familiar words from stock- cube packets: aspartic acid, glutamic acid and taurine, which is the key element of the energy drink Red Bull. Then there is Vitamix, ‘to make prawns grow faster’, Calphorax ‘to help the shell thicken and give better colour’ and Vin Superclear ‘to kill pest, virus and smell’. And on top is a seasoning of antibiotic.
Prawn farming is an ancient activity in tropical countries. Coastal peoples in Indonesia and Vietnam have trapped young marine prawns in brackish ponds for at least 500 years, feeding them up with fish scraps and household waste to eat or sell. The prawns, properly farmed, are sweet and juicy: it’s a lucrative business. The larvae can reach marketable size, as long as your hand, in as little as four months. But the trade has changed utterly since black tiger prawns (known as ‘shrimp’ in most countries) and bamboo prawns became a routine luxury in the rich world in the 1990s. The ancient cottage industry was swiftly industrialised. Around the tropical belt, from Ecuador to Indonesia, coastal farmers punched holes in the sea defences and let salt water into their paddy fields for the gold rush.
More… ➡