Shrimp fraud action accumulates problems with which SC Shrimpers is confronted: John Malik

For many reasons I could live the rest of my life, never to eat someone else Frozen shrimpmuch less an imported.

I think everyone who thrown a shrimp network in front of the Fripp or Edisto Islands in the water and cooked an hour later and ate these shrimp would agree.

Grown-up shrimp typically come from India, Brazil, Ecuador or Southeast Asia, and this industry is full of ecological and humanitarian challenges. According to the Environmental Organization Oceana, more than half of these shrimp farms are former mangrove forests, the kindergartens of our oceans, which were destroyed to make away. Some of the farms use a huge amount of chemicals and antibiotics that are rarely caught in a USDA inspection.

Why should a restaurant, especially one on the south coast, use imported shrimp? I asked Jason Janson, owner of Greenville's Broadwater Shrimp, this question.

“The local food movement is important and necessary, and I would like to support all my local farmers and shrimp. However, our government has our local seafood industry not only in SC, but basically crippled over the golf coast,” said Janson. “We should test imported shrimp tests, but there is so much shrimp in the USA, and it is so perishable that it is often missed. I think it is impossible for the federal inspectors to keep up.”

In 2023, the United States imported almost 700,000 tons of shrimp. If I wanted to offer a dozen roasted shrimp on a menu, I can pay about $ 7 per pound for the portrait or $ 17 per pound for SC-Caight shrines. Seven dollars per pound for shrimps that were bred under questionable conditions and traveled halfway through the planet, and they are still cheaper than local shrimp. Of course we need more commercial shrimp, right?

In SC, a commercial shrimp boat needs six different permits, has to pay about 5 US dollars per gallon for fuel and need a boat load (not intended to play a word). In addition, the work is physically challenging and full of danger.

“The five of our stateTH Generation Shrimpers and long line fishermen give up, ”said Janson. You see it as a dead end. This is not only in South Carolina, that's the coast, Texas to North Carolina.”

The South Carolina Shrimpers Association, a non-profit organization that has submitted to the protection of the shrimp industry in the state, submitted a federal action to be asserted in June in which more than two dozen restaurants were accused of using locally endangered shrimp while actually serving frozen, imported shrimp.

“Some of the restaurants mentioned in the lawsuit bought five or six hundred pounds a week,” said Janson. “Our local shrimp, how will you compete with price or quantity? I'm not for more laws, but something has to be done, otherwise we will lose our shrimp industry because the amount of cheap shrimp comes onto the market.”

The problem goes beyond South Carolina. Sead Consulting, a company that was discontinued by the Southern Shrimp Alliance to carry out genetic tests, found imports that camouflage in every tourist city along the golf and the east coast as local seafood. New Orleans showed the best with only 13% false advertising. Cities such as St. Petersburg, Savannah, Mobile, Wilmington and Charleston hovered over 70%. Charleston wore the main burden of negative advertising because 90% of the restaurant restaurants tested by SEAD were imported.

So what is the answer?

“We have to keep raising our consumers,” said Janson. “Aquaculture is important if they are practiced ethically. There are people who do it right and you need help from the government, from consumers.”

Farm to Table is not a kitchen, but an ethos, a promise of the restaurant to the consumer that is based on the kitchen and its menu on principles. If this promise is broken by a few, it hurts all of us. Perhaps this is a water catchment torque for our industry, and laws will be both shrimp and the food public, which pays the promise of “locally”.

John Malik is a restaurant trainer and hospitator. It can be reached at chefjohnmalik@gmail.com.

Related links:

https://oceana.org/5-facts-will-you-wink-twice-about-eeateting-amported-farm-roisedrimp/

https://shrimpalliance.com/genetic-testing-initiative-a–big-win-for-local-rimpers/