Seafood Testing Could Last for Decades

I’m not a reader of USA Today, but today this headline caught my eye: Seafood testing from Gulf oil disaster could last decades. Oil is hard to get rid of; it can stay in the environment for an extremely long time, and because all parts of the food chain will be affected, the potential cumulative effect is significant.

Let me emphasize that the word, for now at least, is that Gulf seafood is safe to eat. Federal waters offshore have been closed, but the waters closer to shore have been unaffected as of yet and are still open for fishing.

However, the spate of food contamination outbreaks in the last decade has given the public cause to be wary of that reassurance. As we know now, most food safety and testing programs don’t have the funding or the staff to keep up with the amount of monitoring that needs to be done. Add to that the use of chemical dispersants whose effects are largely unknown, and that makes the term “safe” start to sound subjective.

One of the the many, many things I find upsetting about this catastrophe is that even if seafood production in the Gulf is seriously affected, this will be invisible to most people elsewhere in the country. So far it’s literally not too visible because the oil hasn’t been washing up on our beautiful white sand beaches, and it won’t be visible at the supermarket because Gulf seafood accounts for only 5% of the total seafood consumption in the U.S. (although it does make up about 40% of domestic production). Much of the shrimp consumed nationwide is imported, and much of that is farmed. It’s those of us who eat the seafood caught just off our shores who will be most affected, and the only thing that’s certain at this point is that we don’t yet know exactly what the effects will be.

Check out this 2009 article at Orion for a look at the Gulf shrimping industry, and perspective on how imported farmed shrimp has driven prices down to unsustainable – in every sense of the word – levels.

Here’s a roundup of a few other articles discussing seafood safety:

New York Times: Waiting for the Oil Spill to Reach the Dinner Table – a couple of weeks old at this point, but contains some good statistics about U.S. seafood consumption.

Salon: Should You Avoid Gulf Seafood? – speculation about how public concern about seafood safety will affect the economics of the Gulf fisheries.

Civil Eats: As Oil Continues to Spill, Locals Snatch Up Seafood – another take on the potential impact to Gulf fisheries.

Cool Green Science: Gulf Oil Spill: The Slick We Didn’t See – Bill Finch writes about the potential effects of all that oil beneath the surface.

ADDED 5/22: Visit the NOAA Fisheries web site for information on fisheries closures and more, including downloadable maps and fact sheets.