Things you probably didn't want to know about shrimp

From author Frederik Pohl, whose novel "The Space Merchants" postulated in vitro meat culture in 1952:

Want Some Seafood, Mama? wrote:A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. We now turn our attention to shrimp, perhaps the fastest-growing foodstuff we obtain from the seas in this 21st Century of ours.

If you’re not eating a lot more shrimp in your family’s diet these days you are out of step with the rest of the world. Shrimp are not only as tasty as all get-out and a great source of protein but they have proved beautifully easy to farm; over the last few decades the world’s farmed shrimp production has grown from under 100,000 tons a year to well over 3,000,000....

I really recommend that squeamish seafood lovers do not click the link for the rest.

LAZ wrote:I really recommend that squeamish seafood lovers do not click the link for the rest.

For the ecologically squeamish, the environmental harm caused by shrimp farming is old news (eg, Thai Shrimp Farmers Facing Ecologists' Fury, New York Times, April 28, 1996). If it's the biofloc technology (microbial recycling of the shrimps' waste) that offends, it's essentially another form of composting and greatly reduces the need for sludge dumping, a major cause of environmental damage.

Speaking of squeamish and seafood, have a look (or not) at Fish and Shellfish Processing by MT Gillies (ISBN 0815505744). I'm especially offended by the chapters Treating Tainted Bivalves, Converting Normally Inedible Clams to Edible Clams and Chemical Treatments for Producing Soft-Shell Crabs. Shrimp-specific chapters include Improving the Color of Raw Shrimp with Acid and Increasing Color of Shrimp Using Canthaxanthin.

Rene G wrote:If it's the biofloc technology (microbial recycling of the shrimps' waste) that offends, it's essentially another form of composting and greatly reduces the need for sludge dumping, a major cause of environmental damage.

It isn't so much that they compost the shrimps' feces that's unsettling. It's that the "recycling" is feeding the composted poop back to the shrimp.