Organic Shrimp's Hopeful Debut

Shrimp, America's most popular seafood, isn't kosher—and sometimes it hardly seems natural either. In 2001, imported farmed shrimp from China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand were found to contain trace amounts of chloramphenicol, a carcinogenic antibiotic. As Public Citizen notes in its 2004 report, "Chemical Cocktail," this is just one of a host of chemicals used in farmed shrimp, which also may be contaminated with neurotoxic organophosphate pesticides. And almost all shrimp, whether farmed or wild-caught, are treated with such preservatives as sodium bisulfite and sodium tripoly phosphate, which can cause allergic reactions such as hives or wheezing.

As for the environment, Asian trawling has decimated sea-turtle populations and wasted up to 15 pounds of unwanted "bycatch" fish per pound of shrimp. Shrimp farming has devastated mangrove forests, ruined fish nurseries and left behind polluted inland pools.

Trying to find untainted little crustaceans is an iffy prospect at best. Antibiotic concerns spurred the push for country-of-origin labeling in the United States, but the labeling won't go into effect until September at the earliest. Other options include Alaskan trap-caught spot prawns, but these aren't always available. Now, however, some enterprising aquaculturists are producing certified organic varieties that, they claim, pose no environmental threats.

Ocean Boy Farms of Florida and the Permian Sea Shrimp Company of Texas feed their shrimp an organic diet and use no antibiotics or hormones, and these shrimp are certified organic by Quality Certification Systems (QCS). "In an organic system, you stock fewer animals and you develop the environment of the ponds so that they produce their own natural flora to live on. It's the equivalent of pasturing cattle as opposed to putting them in a feedlot," says Bart Reid, owner of Permian. Reid uses an organic soybean feed; Ocean Boy shrimp munch organic tilapia.

As for pollution, "We don't stock so many [shrimp] that the pond itself can't absorb the waste, converting it into fertilizer and algae that the shrimp feed on," Reid says. At harvest, water drained from Permian ponds is either saved for next year's ponds or fed into an artificial wetland, a habitat for birds and endangered Pecos River pupfish. When Ocean Boy ponds are drained, the water is reused in other ponds, and waste is swept out, dried and sold as organic fertilizer.

Organic also means you won't be eating preservatives, which plump shrimp up with water, adding as much as 20 percent by weight. All that water washes out while cooking, taking the flavor with it, says Eddy Daniel, Vice President of Manufacturing, Ocean Boy Farms. As Stutts Armstrong, Vice President of Sales of Ocean Boy, puts it, "People don't even know what shrimp taste like anymore; they're just a vehicle for cocktail sauce."