Do You Know What's in That Shrimp You're Eating
This week, Italian officials issued a food safety alert after discovering an excessive amount of sulphites in shrimp imported from Brazil. In Belgium, two EU-illegal, but commonly used antibiotics were discovered in black tiger shrimp shipped from India.
Sounds gross, right? Well, these chemicals turn up more frequently than we would like in imported farm raised shrimp, which constitutes about 80% of the shrimp we eat as Americans.
Worse still, the FDA only examines 1-2% of imported seafood – including farm-raised shrimp – which means, more often then not, we have no idea what we are eating.
Even though the U.S. has banned a number of drugs and chemicals commonly used in shrimp farming (some are known carcinogens while others contribute to antibiotic resistance in humans) these drugs are not prohibited in many shrimp producing countries.
So, while the U.S. government may say that these substances aren’t acceptable for human consumption, it’s a little hard to enforce when they’re only examining one one-hundredth of what comes across the boarder. Yuck!
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