Shrimp

The shrimp is a workaday crustacean.

At the third of four grocery stores I go to every Sunday — Eastern European, general, Chinese, Yemeni, in that order — there is a waist-high stainless-steel trough right by the entrance, its four sections filled with ice topped with loose shrimp and packaged salmon.

The shrimp are standard size, no more than three inches in length when extended. Gray little guys. Head-on or head-off, it’s up to you, but all come shell-on. $6.99 per pound.

The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his “My Struggle” series, writes about prawns and langoustines a few times each. On prawns: “Alive they looked almost like office workers of the ocean, in death like a company of ballet dancers.”

In New Orleans, fried shrimp spill from po boys like clowns from a Volkswagen. These are almost always the shrimpy-shrimp, no bigger than a single segment of your thumb. This, truly, is a workaday crustacean; a menu from the 24-hour gas station and meat market where I used to buy po boys, in a picture from Yelp dated October 2022, prices a 10” shrimp po boy at $8.99 and a full 32” loaf at $25.99.

Growing up in a rural area with a history of dairy farming, when a teacher told my elementary school class that kids who grew up in cities didn’t know where milk came from, I probably thought she was lying or that, gee, city kids sure were freaks. But even now, I find it hard to imagine shrimp in the wild. I can imagine some Gulf Coast kid in a classroom, screwing up his face in disbelief after his teacher tells him, “Some kids don’t even know shrimp come from the ocean!”

So, I watched a video from the YouTube channel “ShrimpAlliance” about how shrimp boats work. It’s the only video on the channel, though they have 2.59k subscribers.

Shrimp is a sustainable product, as far as fisheries go, the kind-voiced Southern man in the ShrimpAlliance video tells me. An annual species. There’s a new crop every year. But ShrimpAlliance would say that; the channel is owned by Southern Shrimp Alliance, “an organization of shrimp fishermen, shrimp processors, and other members of the domestic industry in the eight warmwater shrimp producing states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.”

I shouldn’t take such an accusatory tone — the Southern Shrimp Alliance would say shrimp is a sustainable resource, because they need to sustain the resource to sustain a living over time.

I’ll leave you with this bit from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website:

“Shrimp is the most popular seafood in the United States. In fact, on average, we each eat nearly six pounds of shrimp every year! It’s both farmed and wild-caught, and America imports most of what we eat. Environmentally sustainable shrimp can be tough to come by, but shrimp lovers should not despair!”

Despair not, shrimp lover — your dinner has traveled far to get here, from faraway ocean floors, and we’re only a quarter of the way through the year. You’ve pounds to eat yet.