HOUSTON—Before you reach for that shrimp cocktail, you need to know what you could be eating.
Recently the FDA issued warnings about eating foreign shrimp because of the chemicals found inside of it.
What’s more, Gulf Coast shrimpers say they’re being put out of business by the foreign imports, which may not even be safe to eat.
Despite recent federal import restrictions, 150 million pounds of farm-raised shrimp from China still makes its way to tables in the U.S. every year.
But the FDA found Chinese shrimp to be contaminated with outlawed antibiotics known to cause cancer in lab mice.
"This is a seafood that is especially dangerous, because the way that it’s grown. So if you can choose wild-caught shrimp from the U.S., you’re a lot safer," Wenonah Hauter of Food and Water Watch said.
In all, 81 percent of the shrimp we eat comes from foreign countries like China, Thailand and Indonesia – countries where the pond-raised shrimp are fed antibiotics and other chemicals with little to no government oversight.
The result? The foreign shrimp we eat at most restaurants may not be safe, but it’s cheap.
That’s why the dwindling number of shrimp boats sit idly at docks in Freeport and across the Gulf Coast.
In the past, hundreds of shrimp boats would dock outside of Gary Gore’s Western Seafood processing plant.
"There were, at one time when I was a child, there were nine different processing plants. Now, there’s just one, and that’s us," Gore said.
Gore said the Gulf’s shrimp supply is plentiful, but it’s becoming too expensive to harvest. In the 1970s, Gore got $5 a pound for shrimp. Now he gets half that – all while paying higher fuel costs.
"We have to diversify. We have to cut corners everywhere we can just to survive," Gore said.
And things just got tougher. A federal investigation is going on right now into three very large U.S. processors allegedly buying cheap pond-raised foreign shrimp and illegally labeling and selling it as more expensive U.S. wild-caught shrimp.
Federal agents say the companies will likely be indicted soon. Shrimpers now worry what will happen if the mislabeled foreign shrimp makes someone sick.
"When you have a scare on a particular foodstuff, it’s going to drive people totally away from the market. Not necessarily to you, but away from the market overall," Patrick Riley, general manager of Western Seafood, said.
Experts say fear could potentially collapse the market altogether.
From the 5,000 shrimp boats that trawled the Gulf Coast waters in 2000, last year just 880 ventured out to sea.
To save itself, the dying industry has formed the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an eight-state conglomerate lobbying for laws to protect the U.S. shrimper and help all of us realize what we’re really eating when we bite into foreign shrimp.
The Southern Shrimp Alliance recently worked out a deal with Outback Steakhouse in Louisiana to agree to sell nothing but wild-caught U.S. shrimp in its restaurants in that state.
There is also mandatory labeling on packages of shrimp sold at grocery stores saying where that shrimp came from.
