The restaurant walls were covered with shrimp boats—striking
photos of trawlers at docks, at sea, in sunset silhouettes. The Gulf
of Mexico was a mile away. Yet, while I sat eating, real shrimp
boats sat rusting, their outriggers raised as if surrendering.
The box from the dumpster gave me a clue: “Product of
Ecuador. Farm Raised.”
I am farm raised. I nurse a nostalgia for what those words
used to mean. Holding that fetid box, I began to question my
own clueless consumption. From a springboard both pure and
naïve, I dove into all-you-can-eat shrimp.
Shrimp, in my youth in upstate New York, were rare and
pricey. I remember a 1960s shrimp cocktail at the Rainbow
Room atop Rockefeller Center. I don’t remember my date’s face
but I do recall a scent of privilege. Thirty years would pass before
another shrimp scene would be as sharply etched on my mind.
It was late October in the Carolinas. I had tied my sailboat to an
old wood dock in front of a village on the Intracoastal Waterway.
Around me marsh grass tinted gold by the sunset was slowly
emerging from ebbing waters. Barely a month into living aboard,
I’d opened a beer to toast my good fortune when a man from the
village walked onto the dock with a bucket and ball of netting.
With a practiced arabesque he threw the net. It blossomed
into a ten-foot parachute that dappled a circle and sank. In a few
seconds, he pulled the line and wet flopping creatures spilled
onto the dock. He sorted through them, discarded several, and
repeated the motion. Half a dozen throws later the bucket held
two handfuls of shrimp.
“Supper,” he said, and walked o=.
The scene was magical, almost biblical: its grace and bounty,
its sense of proportion—one man, one meal—evoked a sustaining
ocean. As I sailed farther south I began to see shrimp everywhere.
Shrimp boats seining night and day. Roadside stands selling
shrimp from coolers. All-you-can-eat shrimp bu=ets for a few
dollars. These waters, a federal survey reported in 1884, contained “immense schools” of shrimp, so many a man could catch
bushels on a “pleasant evening.” It appeared that nothing had
changed. In fact, everything had changed during a century in
which shrimp had gone from lowly regional fare, caught by
hand, to America’s favorite seafood.
In 1913, one hundred miles down the coast from where I had
watched the man cast his net, Billy Corkum, a Massachusetts
fishing captain, introduced the otter trawl to Amelia Island,
Florida. An ungainly contraption of ropes, cables, wooden doors
and nets, the trawl was dragged through the water just above the
ocean floor, its mouth open like a whale’s. Modified with a drooping chain to “tickle” mud-dwelling shrimp into jumping into the
THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT l 2
maw, diesel-pulled trawls scooped shrimp by the billions.
“We never had so darned many shrimp,” old-timer
Anthony Taranto told the Southern Foodways Alliance, a
University of Mississippi institute that studies southern food
culture. “You couldn’t hardly sell them and couldn’t hardly do
nothing with them.”
Shrimp are a perfect protein delivery system, built with a head
and carapace that twist o= easily, revealing a muscle that can be
cooked in three minutes. The Chinese and Greeks loved them.
Apicius included shrimp in his Roman cookbook. But it took
decades for shrimp to whet appetites outside the American
South. Packed in barrels of ice and shipped by rail, shrimp were
served in tulip glasses as “cocktails” in upstate New York in 1914.
As cookbooks added Low Country recipes, canning and, in 1943,
a shrimp-peeling machine—invented by teenager J. M. Lapeyre
in Houma, Louisiana, who noticed how easily shrimp meat could
be squished out of its shell by his rubber boot—made shrimp
available nationwide.
Trawls soon emptied the shallows of southern waters and
moved deeper. For seventy years growing fleets of bigger boats
galloped from one gold strike to another as veins of shrimp were
discovered o= Louisiana (white, 1933), Mexico (brown, 1940),
Dry Tortugas (pink, 1949), and Key West, where in 1957 huge,
royal red shrimp were discovered a thousand feet down.
“Greater riches are being brought up than all the gold ever
sunk o= the Spanish Main,” gushed National Geographic in 1957.
Many shrimpers became millionaires.
“We were outlaws,” Wallace Beaudreaux, of Brownsville, Texas,
eighty-one, told me, describing raids into Mexican waters. It was
not unusual for boats to gross $10,000 to $25,000 on a single trip.
I felt rich, in 1998, buying a pound of shrimp for a mere three
dollars right o= the boats near where I anchored in Key West. I
had only one question: with thousands of boats endlessly trawling and millions like me endlessly gobbling, how could there be
any shrimp left in the sea?
“Shrimp are a crop, like wheat,” shrimpers replied. “You can’t
overfish them.”
I was asking the wrong question. I should have wondered
where all these shrimp were coming from, and how they could
cost three dollars a pound. I happened to sail into the Deep South
in time to witness the crash of a culture bound to, and blinded
by, endless shrimp dreams.
Shrimp have been around since Gondwana. Their tracks
are found alongside dinosaurs’, which explains their astounding
diversity—more than two thousand species in every body of
water in the world. They are a major food source for Salt Lake
