I like seafood. I like shrimp. Oysters. Crab. Scallops. All of it. Always have. When I was a kid we used to go to the beach and would eat seafood every year. It was the only time that I got to experience the ‘real’ stuff. The other 51 weeks of the year had a rotating schedule of burnt fish sticks, the smell of which instantly makes me nauseous to this day. Oh, how I used to look forward to those meals. Those low country boils. Plates piled high with every bug the ocean had to offer.
Something very unfortunate happened to me a good while back. I found out that my wife is allergic to shellfish. Very allergic. She didn’t know she was allergic but we soon found out after she ate a crabcake and her throat started to close up. We actually met in college when we were both working at a place called, “The Shrimp Factory”. Believe me, the irony is not lost. Her allergy is bad. Once, we had eaten dinner at a Mexican place, an eyelash fell into her eye and she asked me to remove it. Without even thinking I stuck my fat finger in there and fished it out. I had just finished eating shrimp ceviche with remnants of it on my fingers. The swelling went down after a few days but I’ve yet to live that one down.
Fast forward to today and our child tested extremely allergic to shellfish at an allergist. I can now say I’m one of those people who have EpiPens at the ready. It is too risky to cook shellfish in the house, even if they are not here. Who knows what traces I could leave behind. Basically the only time I can eat it is if I am completely away from them and that is not often. Even then, it seems taboo.
This process of abstention from all shellfish has allowed me to step back from my former self. As I have mentioned, it used to be very important to eat seafood anytime I went to a coastal area. It is important to a lot of people. Some people get downright obsessive about it. “I’m going down to the beach and all I’m going to do is eat shrimp and crabs and drink cold beer.”
Do we do this because we want some connection to the area? Do we want to pretend we actually live at the beach and that is what we think locals eat? I guess it makes sense. If you go to Italy you want pasta. If you go to France you expect croissants and snails. But what if you were in France and you found out the croissant was made in Russia?
I remember my dad ordering crab legs one time when we were at the beach. He would crack them open and savor each hard-earned morsel of King Crab. He’d always say something like, “They sure know how to catch them around here.” And now that I am not able to eat crab I reflect on memories like that longingly. Then one day it occurred to me. King crab does not come from the Gulf. Nor Florida, Georgia, or any other state in the South. It comes from the Artic. Most of the crab down here is Blue Crab and you’d end up starving before you could crack enough of those to fill you up. A lot of these people salivating as they sit down to a big plate of fat, juicy crab legs at the beach are not aware of this.
We went to the beach in South Carolina not so long ago. I decided I wanted to cook some local fish since it’s my only option. I stopped by a little stall on the side of the road by a marina. There was a man there with a bunch of beat-up coolers that look like they had seen a few squalls. I figured this was the real deal. In one cooler he had fresh-caught shrimp. In the other, he had fresh-caught salmon. You don’t “fresh catch” salmon off a marina in South Carolina. I asked him about it and he waffled a bit. Said it was flown down. I asked what kind of shrimp the “fresh-caught” ones were. Gulf Shrimp. We had a good stare. Then he confided in me that all of it, every bit of seafood he ever sells comes frozen from the grocery store. The guy had been in business for 20 years doing this and nobody ever called him on it.
All these memories started to hit me at once. I was a waiter. I was a waiter in a tourist town by the beach and every time someone asked me if the fish was caught locally I’d say yes. Did I know that? No, but I sure didn’t want to ask the chefs because they were mean and I sure didn’t want to lose the sale either. Waiters are liars. Men with beat-up coolers by marinas are liars. You can get just as fresh seafood at any beach as you can get at a raw bar in Omaha.
Some people say they can tell the difference between fresh fish and frozen. No. No, they can’t. Not if the frozen stuff is the good stuff. You’d never know. Just like you’d never know if your coffee had caffeine in it or not if you ordered it at a restaurant. Just so you know, 9 times out of 10 you’re getting decaf because it’s better to give decaf to everyone than risk giving the person with a heart condition regular.
Where am I going with this? I haven’t had shellfish in at least 5 years. If someone sat me at a restaurant on a pier with a plate of boiled shrimp that had been harvested from a farm in Pakistan, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t ask where they came from. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. Ignorance is bliss and I miss shrimp.