Is The Shrimp You Are Eating Really Safe?
By: Stephen Crews
Updated: May 18, 2012
With Americans eating more shrimp -- more than 1 billion pounds a year or 4 pounds per person -- than salmon, crab and trout combined, the crustacean seems to be the U.S.'s favorite seafood.
"It's all over the menu," said New Orleans chef Brian Landry of the seafood restaurant Borgne. "The shrimper men hit the dock yesterday morning. By 3 p.m. the shrimp were in our kitchen."
Landry uses only local gulf shrimp, but most Americans don't know that 90 percent of the shrimp they purchase at the grocery store -- and in most restaurants -- never see a shrimper or even a fishing boat.
Most of the fresh shrimp eaten in the United States is raised in small, overcrowded pens on shrimp farms in countries like India, Thailand and Vietnam, according to the federal government.
And too often, the shrimp is raised in shockingly disgusting conditions that promote disease.
"A shrimp that's farm-raised in a foreign country to produce the yield they need and the quantity they need, they'll use any means necessary that we don't use here," Landry said.
To keep the shrimp from dying in diseased waters from their own muck, some shrimp farmers routinely pour antibiotics that are not allowed in the U.S. into their pens -- and some of it is reaching U.S. grocery stores.
