Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones has this stunning news about shrimp's carbon footprint.
No, this doesn't mean that beef's carbon foot print is acceptable because it's not. It's an extreme user of fossil fuels, water and land and is one of the highest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet. The problem is that the new industrialized production of shrimp is even higher..10 Times higher!
The US imports 90% of the shrimp consumed here! You heard that right. Here you were thinking that eating some seafood especially the tiny, harmless shellfish was the ecological thing to do. But, if you are eating shrimp there is a 90% chance that you are eating enormous amounts of fossil fuel.
Shrimp lovers don't need to crash a fancy party to enjoy premium, seasoned-to-perfection shrimp," announced a Taco Bell press release last year. The chain was heralding its "Pacific Shrimp Taco," which featured a half-dozen "premium shrimp" for just $2.79.
Marketing campaigns like Taco Bell's , along with Red Lobster's periodic "Endless Shrimp" promotions, crystallize shrimp's transformation from special-treat food to everyday cheap fare. What happened? The answer lies in the rise of factory-scale shrimp farms over the last generation. Twenty years ago, 80 percent of shrimp consumed here came from domestic wild fisheries, with imports supplying the rest. Today, we've more than flipped those numbers: the US imports 90 percent of the shrimp consumed here. We now bring in a staggering 1.2 billion pounds of it annually, mainly from farms in Asia. Between 1995 and 2008, the inflation-adjusted price of wild-caught Gulf shrimp plunged 30 percent.
These shellfish factory farms generate poverty in the nations that house them, they privatize and cut down highly productive mangrove forests that once sustained fishing communities, leaving fetid dead zones in their wake.
In his excellent 2008 book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, the Canadian journalist Taras Grescoe took a hard look at the Asian operations that supply our shrimp. His conclusion: "The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world's poorest nations."
The industrial shrimp farming style is a
slash and burn type of argriculture which only last for 5 years or so before the buildup of sludge in the ponds and the acid sulfate soil renders them unfit for shrimp.
Our food system is at the nexus of climate change, public health and energy. Many changes are needed but they will probably not come from policy. They will come from our conscious awareness of the food we eat and the changes we make to our diet that make for a cleaner diet and healthier planet. Eating animals and animal products is not sustainable for the current and future Earth population.