Shrimp On Your Plate? Think Twice (Your Liver, Endangered Mangroves, And Poorly Paid Workers Will Thank You)

Not to be a downer in the middle of the holiday season, but since environmental devastation doesn't seem willing to wait for a more convenient time, it doesn't seem fair to wait to talk about it either. Today, let's talk about shrimp.

Chances are, unless you shook the hand of the fisherman who caught your shrimp, you're eating shrimp raised on farms with toxic chemicals in minimally-regulated conditions, and often with slave labor. (Literally—we're not talking low-wage workers here, but that's another post entirely.)

To make space for these farms, mangroves and other delicate ecosystems are often destroyed, which means not only contaminating the local environments with pesticides used to raise the shrimp and antibiotics to prevent diseases that naturally occur in overcrowded conditions (is this sounding similar to the problems occurring in other animal agriculture industries? It should), but also destroying populations of the other marine life that people in these regions have traditionally depended on.