Daily Archives: July 4, 2020
Seadrift fishermen struggle with shrimp-sized market
Shrimping season arrived in May, but it didn’t bring renewed demand for Gulf shellfish. After restaurants began to close in March, demand for oysters tanked. Some oyster harvesters were able to scrape through the season, but Nevarez said shrimp season has been even bleaker. “After all these outbreaks we’ve been having, they’re probably going to start closing again,” she said of the restaurants that normally buy her husband’s shrimp. She said she’s encouraging her husband, a shrimper of 35 years, to begin considering alternate work. >click to read< 18:34
Shrimper Steve, the Spot Prawn King
Before the mid-2000s, when the first Spot Prawn Festival took place in Vancouver and The 100-Mile Diet was published, nearly all of B.C.’s spot prawns were sent overseas. The shellfish were brand new to most consumers, explains Steve Johansen, a fisherman with Organic Ocean who sold 100-Mile-Diet author J.B. MacKinnon his first spot prawns and launched the festival with Vancouver chef Rob Clark in 2007. “Even people who lived in B.C. all their lives didn’t know what a spot prawn was, and the other half of those people thought tiger prawns were from B.C., whereas they’re all raised in Southeast Asia.” Spot prawns are the largest of seven commercially harvested shrimp species in British Columbia. >click to read< 09:32