In the U.S. Shrimp has been very prominent and has been an important part of our diet, but most of us do not acknowledge how important shrimp is or how it ends up in our supermarkets. In Louisiana, the gathering of shrimp goes back to the seventeenth century where bayou residents used seines up to 600 feet in diameter to harvest the seafood. As of today, America harvests roughly over half a million pounds of shrimp and also import an additional 200 million pounds a year. There are more than 2,000 different types of species of shrimp found throughout the world, the origins of shrimp are hard to pinpoint but different species have been able to reside in fresh, salt, and brackish water. Despite there being that many different species of …show more content…
Despite shrimp having a high source of protein, it is also very high in cholesterol and has many other nutritional downfalls. A study found that 90% of shrimp are now farm raised but less than 2% of it is regulated by US regulatory agencies, which means we truly don’t know what we have in our shrimp. The majority of shrimp that is farmed is farmed with a chemical called Organophosphates that cause memory loss and is toxic to our nervous system. The most alarming part of fish farming is that it is ultimately destroying the earth.It takes three pounds of regular fish to sustain a single pound of farmed fish, which in turn causes a huge decrease in fish population thus causing an imbalanced bio-sphere. Shrimp farming is also an issue for mangroves, worldwide 40% of mangroves are being destroyed for more shrimp farming and this type of damage has been labeled as permanent .Another way that shrimp farming is harming the environment is that brackish water shrimp aquaculture is depopulating parts of Bangladesh and making it uninhabitable.
Shrimp that has been farmed has a preservative in it called 4-hexylresorcinol to keep the shrimp a certain color but the preservative has been known to increase breast cancer in women and lower sperm count in men, which potentially can harm humanity as it lowers our chances at