Shrimp: The Endless Quest for Pink Gold

In this eminently readable and very attractive book, Jack and Anne Rudloe chronicle the struggle between recreational fishermen and others who harvest the sea for sport and professional shrimpers; between environmentalists and shrimp farmers; between shrimp exporters the world over and domestic interests. The battle is fought in diplomatic circles, in legislative bodies and courts of law as well as on the ocean. They also report on the increasing involvement of science and technology that is turning shrimp farming into a worldwide multi-billion dollar industry. No longer do Gulf Coast wives look out over the ocean and sing "Shrimp boats are a-coming/Their sails are in sight./Shrimp boats are a-coming/There's dancing tonight." Instead men and women in white coats solemnly check the salinity, temperature and bacterial content of the water in giant shrimp farms while assembly line machines turn shrimp into a prepared, prepackaged, uniform product for mass market consumption. In short this book chronicles the dying of an industry and a way of life and the birth of something different, something a bit alien to the old ways. The Rudloes simultaneously make the reader feel for the shrimpers whose livelihood is being taken away from them and for the environmentalists who want to protect the oceans, the mangroves, the turtles and myriad creatures that form the ecology on the ocean floor. Jack Rudloe is a hands-on kind of guy who has gone out with shrimpers and worked as a deck hand, a man who has spent a lifetime collecting marine specimens for a variety of aquariums, museums, and biological labs as well as for the Rudloe's own Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory. Together they have been aboard a Coast Guard vessel as it stops a shrimper suspected of being in violation of the shrimping laws. They have also attended meetings at which such laws have been fiercely debated. Additionally they are experts in marine biology and in the technology of shrimping. Anne holds a PhD and teaches marine biology at Florida State University. They bring the kind of expertise to the subject at hand that few others could. Not only that but they also write very well and work hard to be objective. You can smell the foamy brine and the roll of the waves; you can taste the succulent white meat of Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei (now the most common species farmed) as it comes hot off the grill. And you can sense the pollution from the industrial waste pouring into the seas from plants upriver as well as see the stolid force of condominiums built on land that once was part of an estuary. This story could play out (and has) using cod fish, tuna or sardines or a number of other sea animals in a hundred different places around the world. Here the story is about a resource of the seas that initially seemed inexhaustible, but like the mackerel crowded seas of the poet soon proved extremely vulnerable to the rapacious appetite of humans. This book is about shrimp of cours

This book was something that I just bought on a lark. I seemed like it might be alright, but nothing to thrilling. I was wrong, very wrong. The shrimp industry, and how it operates, turns out to be a very, very interesting topic for a book. The thing I thought I knew before I read the book, and did know, is that this is a very low margin industry for most involved. The thing I did not know was the extent to which it will even get worse in the future with shrimp farming. The book is readable and very accessible, but still very detailed and informative. If you only know that you like to eat shripm, and not much else I would get this book.

Surprisingly, the story weaves together these facets so that it develops into the rarified "hard to put down" book category: the different varieties of shrimp and their oddly different behaviors that even long-time ship captains don't understand, life on the shrimpboats, the geography and oceanography, the modern shrimp farms, the science, the marketplace, the plagues, the politics! Do the hurricanes help or hurt? Most readers would have no idea that all this was going on "behind the scenes" when they sit down for a jumbo shrimp platter (and why "jumbo" after all, rather than the many other worldwide types?). Very well done. A great read and highly recommended.

I love shrimp. I've loved shrimp since I was a small child. Broiled, boiled, fried, in chowders, in Bouillabaisse, any way at all. When I was very small, I used to look forward to our family trips to Detroit's Chinatown to have dinner at Chung's Restaurant on Peterborough, because they had more shrimp dishes than any place I'd ever been. I'm also a great fan of narrow-topic nonfiction books, like John McPhee's Oranges (Penguin Modern Classics), or Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, so should be obvious that I was a likely candidate for this book. But there's plenty for the non-shrimp-loving general reader, too- though with US shrimp consumption at 963 million pounds per year- that's about three pounds for every man, woman and child- there appear to be very few non-shrimp eaters among us. The authors of this fascinating volume are a married couple: A nature writer with a good education in marine biology, and an academic with a PhD in marine biology. Between the two of them they've crafted an exceedingly well written tale that covers just about everything you'd care to know about shrimp. It begins with one of the authors gathering biological specimens on a shrimp boat in the Florida Gulf in his youth, and ends with a serious discussion of the need to protect the natural fish stocks in the oceans. In between, we learn about the over 4,000 different shrimp species (the authors quote an expert who remarks that just about every crustacean that isn't a lobster, barnacle or crab seems to be a "shrimp") the life cycle of the shrimp, life on a shrimp boat, how shrimp farming came to be (and why wild caught shrimp still taste better), the ecological costs of shrimp farming, the fight against shrimp poaching, and much more. There are even a few good tips on preparing (and selecting) shrimp. This is the sort of detailed reporting that one used to find in the New Yorker before they decided that their readers couldn't handle a story much longer than a few pages. Highly recommended for fans of nonfiction, ocean lore, biology, and, anyone who enjoys a well-crafted piece of reporting.