On the Safe Side: Our thinking on the Gulf of Mexico's seafood

Although the culinary impacts of the BP oil spill are the least of the nation's concerns, here at Pachamama's we do have a responsibility to think about the issue from the epicurean lens. Should we continue to serve seafood from the Gulf, or find another source?

Most of our fish comes from Hawaii*** (with a few exceptions, such as the Alaskan halibut on this month's dinner menu). The main Gulf-of-Mexico-sourced product we serve is rock shrimp, in our "Rock Shrimp and Mac & Cheese 'Lollipops'". So it's our duty to figure out if Gulf seafood would be safe, and to do that, we had to figure out what safe meant.

An AP article in Sunday's Lawrence Journal World, "Agency: Gulf seafood tested so far is safe for eating," says that the FDA has deemed Gulf seafood safe for eating. They do a "smell test" (that's what it sounds like) and some basic chemical analysis for just some of the chemical compounds resulting from the oil spill.

But the problem is, the Gulf of Mexico and its fishing industry is huge. The FDA can't test all the fish all the time, and seafood processors get seafood from many different fishermen. So doing a wide enough sampling is difficult, and controlling where the seafood is caught is difficult, too.

And this sort of statement is worrisome, too: "One fish sample has failed the smell test, but did not show concerning levels of contaminants, Kevin Griffis of the Commerce Department said Friday." To paraphrase: the sample did contain some contaminants, but FDA says that the levels weren't high enough to be problematic. But isn't any amount of oil-based contaminant a bad thing?

To be on the safe side, we're backing away from shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico. Once we run through our stash of shrimp (we buy a high-quality frozen product), we'll be looking for other sources of a high-quality rock shrimp to use. We'll keep you posted on what we're able to find.

***Note to readers: The eco-impact of serving any seafood in Kansas is something we think about a lot, and it's a topic worth discussing on this blog. Stay tuned for posts on our viewpoints concerning environmental issues such as over-fishing and farm-raising, quality of product, human health, transportation and fossil fuels, etc.