All You Can Eat/
A journey through a seafood fantasy
by Jim Carrier
The green dumpster behind Red Lobster was nearly empty when I lifted the lid. Through the effluvium of yesterday’s supper, way down, sat a couple of pretty blue boxes. I hitched myself over the rim, leaned in, and took one.
I am not a regular dumpster diver. I was driven by a hunger for knowledge. Inside the restaurant, where the décor, ambience, soundtrack—all but the smell—reeked of the sea, I asked the server who laid before me the first plate of Red Lobster’s “endless shrimp” where they came from.
“Farms,” she said.
“Where are these farms?” I asked.
“Different places.” She gave a shrug. “Do you want another beer?”
I ate only eight grilled shrimp from Red Lobster’s “endless” supply. Something was stuck in my craw. An hour before, I had been in a community hall in Brownsville, Texas, with forty-three angry, tearful American shrimpers. In a country awash in shrimp, they were going bankrupt. They had gathered to hear more bad news: severe new rules limiting what they could catch.
“What about Red Lobster?” I asked the group.
“Red Lobster!” one man shouted. “They’re our enemy. They haven’t bought a shrimp since the 1980s.”-snip-
Skinners, aged thirty-two and thirty, each with a one-year-old son, reminded me of cowboys I’d known out West, still pining for pastures before barbed wire. Their dreams of a commons, free to exploit, had once been our dream, so woven into our national DNA that we, like they, mourned its passing. Each spring they rode out after a myth, only to find the world had changed.
The sea stopped giving in the 1980s. Catches flattened worldwide. There were, in fact, only so many shrimp in the sea. And because of overfishing for half a century, the average shrimp size caught in the Gulf had shrunk from “50” to “75.”
There was also growing dismay that shrimpers wasted more than they caught. Down below, in the channel made famous by Union Admiral Farragut’s cry, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead,” was a kind of “fishing” that was nothing short of marine clearcutting.
In the gold-rush days, before Joe and Mike were born, shrimpers killed ten pounds of sea life for every pound of harvested shrimp—waste that reached one billion pounds a year in the Gulf. Once called “trash,” now called “by-catch,” this sea life included sea turtles driven to the brink of extinction, and juvenile red snapper, a good eating fish. Under environmental regulations requiring escape hatches in nets, the by-catch-to-shrimp ratio has been reduced to four-to-one, still a startling sight when the Skinners dumped their twin nets on deck. Using grain shovels, they transferred this squirming pile into a large wooden box of seawater mixed with Cargil Boat and Boil salt. The shrimp sank to the bottom, and the by-catch, mostly dead, floated to the surface. This they skimmed and threw overboard.
Gulf shrimpers, the last cowboys of the sea, were corralled in 2006 when the U.S. government, trying to balance the Gulf’s ecosystem with a sustainable supply of shrimp for a viable commercial fishery, capped the federal-waters shrimp fleet at twenty-seven hundred boats, down from a gold-rush high of seventy-five hundred, and ordered federal clerks to be randomly stationed aboard to record by-catch. The goal was a “maximum sustainable yield,” roughly 110 million pounds a year, which left 22 billion shrimp to reproduce, according to modeling by Dr. Jim Nance, head of the NOAA Fisheries Service Galveston Laboratory. This figure was half the natural shrimp population before the arrival of the trawl, estimated Bill Hogarth, the former head of the agency.
The Skinners grossed $1,000 on opening day—not a bad haul, I thought, until I learned that it was half the price they got when they were teenagers. They made a living but not a killing selling their shrimp to their father, who ran a roadside stand on Dauphin Island. “The last few years, we’re just paying for fuel,” said Joe, sitting below their federal license framed on the Masonite wall of their boat’s dinette. “If it weren’t for the shop . . .” His voice trailed off.
What really ended the Skinners’ dreams, what really brought shrimpers to their knees and tears in Mobile Bay, Brownsville, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Bayou la Batre—all along the Gulf Coast—was not regulation or lack of shrimp but good old global supply and demand. “Because of imported, farmed shrimp from the Far East,” said Joe Skinner, “wholesale shrimp prices in the U.S. are the same as when Dad started thirty years ago.”
MUCH MORE...Good Read about "Red Lobster" and other Restaurants Exploitation and flaws in our Import and Disclosure Laws about the Shrimp (and other seafood) we EAT!
at.....
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4395
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