Tax, credit card, identity theft – all common crimes that come to mind when you mention fraud. But shrimp fraud?
Shrimp fraud is likely less known, as well as just how serious an issue it really is unless one is part of that important industry along the Texas coast. But the problem is already driving a struggling sector of Gulf Coast agriculture and a way of life for generations to the brink.
Brett Anderson has been investigating this issue for the New York Times. He joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Shrimp fraud: Tell us how this is perpetrated.
Brett Anderson: Well, it is a problem that I have heard shrimpers complain about for a couple of decades now. I’ve lived in Louisiana and worked as a food journalist there for 25 years, a couple decades at the local newspaper there and now at the New York Times.
It’s not hard to find someone in the shrimping industry, I have found, that will say that restaurants are misrepresenting local shrimp and really selling imports. That’s something I’ve heard claimed for a long time. And late last year, I got in contact with a company based out of Houston that is going around to these markets testing shrimp in festivals and testing shrimp in restaurants to see if what they say is local shrimp is really local shrimp.
And what they found has been, I thought, pretty startling and eye-opening. They’re finding that almost more often than not – I believe it’s more often that not – when they’ve gone to test shrimp in restaurants, it has turned out to be foreign, which means that a lot of the times when people are going to restaurants – particularly in the South, in these areas where they’ve tested – they are not getting what they think they’re paying for.
Well, wait a minute – where are these shrimp coming from, if not the Gulf?
Well, over 90% of the shrimp that is consumed in the United States is imported.
The great, great majority of that comes from aquaculture farms in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and South America. And so it’s not wild shrimp. And if you’re consuming domestic shrimp, it largely comes wild caught from the Gulf of Mexico.
How do you know whether it’s wild-caught or whether it came from Southeast Asia?
Well, you know, people who are in the shrimping industry and eat a lot in the South sort of claim that you can taste a difference. I believe that you can taste the difference as well, but it can be pretty hard if you’re eating a fried shrimp po’boy that you put hot sauce onto to determine the nuances of how this shrimp tastes.
And in there, I think lies the problem. It’s kind of easy to get away – or has been easy to get away – historically, with telling people you’re serving local shrimp, but really feeding them something else.
I was telling you a little bit before that I saw a YouTube video where someone was going around to restaurants in New Orleans and he went to six or seven of them and only one of these restaurants that were advertising Gulf Coast shrimp…
Well, most of them sheepishly admitted, “well, no, it’s not Gulf Coast. It comes from somebody somewhere else” and they wouldn’t really go on to explain further. But it really raised a lot of eyebrows. You should’ve seen the comment section.
How is importing shrimp like this taking a toll out on the shrimping industry writ large? You say that you’ve heard from folks in the industry for decades.
Yeah, I mean, basically the main impact is that it’s just collapsing the price that domestic shrimpers can get at the dock because the imported shrimp is just so much less expensive, while domestic shrimp in the United States has been more expensive to go out and catch, right?
The fuel costs have been up, equipment costs are up. In Louisiana, there’s also this phenomenon of the places where shrimpers can go to get shrimp is changing and is often further from shore than it was in previous generations because of efforts to rebuild land by diverting water from the Mississippi River.
It’s really a cost issue. And with great unanimity, all of the shrimpers I spoke to basically said that when they go out to get shrimp here in the Gulf South, that they’re basically taking a loss.
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I was looking at some numbers from the ’80s shrimp industry in Texas, valued at something like half a billion dollars a year just looking at the haul. In 2014, that was down to just half that. And last year, the haul was something like $84 million, just a sliver of what it used to be.
We’ve been hearing and reading stories about how this is affecting life there on the Texas Gulf Coast and obviously Gulf Coast of Louisiana, too.
But what, if anything, can be done about it? You mentioned this testing consultancy in Houston. Can they do anything about this? Are we talking about labeling standards or what?
Well, the team out of Houston, it’s a company called SEAD Consulting, and they’ve created this rapid genetic test that allows them fairly cheaply and inexpensively to get a result as to the provenence of the shrimp.
And what they hope to do is to expose the fact that this is a problem and to offer this technology they have to government agencies who have been charged with enforcing laws that are already on the books in the state of Louisiana. But also, laws with the [Federal Trade Commission] FTC prohibit restaurants from misrepresenting imported shrimp as being a law.
The problem has been with enforcement. For example, in Louisiana, for over five or so years, there was thousands of infractions recorded by the Department of Health, which is the agency that is charged with enforcing the laws here. But there was no fines that were given out during all that time because there was just these kind of loose laws and the enforcement language wasn’t in there.
So last year in Louisiana, the state Legislature actually passed a law that puts more tough enforcement language into the law in Louisiana that makes it illegal for restaurants to misrepresent, particularly shrimp and crawfish – which are big products in Louisiana, as they are in the coast of Texas – but also other seafood. It requires restaurants to more clearly label what they are selling.
