Prawns

Prawns are entry-level shellfish. Firm and smooth, often seen with just their graceful tail left on, they’re somehow normalized, at a pincer’s length from the messy insect-ness of other crustaceans. Children like them; almost everyone does. Giant Indo-Pacific tiger prawns, smoky with barbecue juices. Tiny European prawns sold in a pint glass, to be gobbled like peanuts. Amaebi from northern Japanese waters, eaten raw, their flavour sweet, their mouthfeel creamy. (These cold-loving prawns switch from male to female in the course of their life: they’re at their sweetest when young, before the spontaneous gender reassignment occurs.) Prawns in a paella, or a ceviche, or a jambalaya, or served with discs of radish over rye bread on a Swedish Midsommar evening. There’s no getting away from Caridea, to give the creatures their formal name, and nor would we want to.

But there’s a cost to our taste for them. The industry faces regular flak for environmentally or ethically questionable practices. Prawn trawling in the wild clearly sweeps up a plethora of other, untargeted creatures. This is, in all fairness, a scourge of the wider global fisheries sector: it’s estimated that over half a million marine mammals alone, not to mention turtles and other vulnerable species, die as bycatch every year. In 2021, FAO laid down guidelines for preventing and reducing the phenomenon. These comprise a mix of institutional approaches and technical solutions such as acoustic deterrents and vessel monitoring systems.

But the charge sheet doesn’t stop there. For farmed prawns, routine eyestalk ablation involves cutting off females’ eyes to hasten sexual maturity and spawning. While the exact neurotransmission process has yet to be understood, the practice has been branded cruel and stress-inducing; it has also been shown to triple mortality rates and damage eggs’ resistance to disease. The list continues with toxic spills and the destruction of mangroves to make room for prawn farms in Asia, where production is heavily concentrated. (Other parts of the world are catching up. Preliminary data for 2021 suggests Ecuador may have unseated India as the top exporter. In early 2022, the war in Ukraine forced the closure of Europe’s largest prawn farm, after just four months of operation.)

Consumers can help minimize damage – and partly assuage cruelty concerns – by buying certified prawns, including farmed organic ones. Most certification schemes focus on environmental sustainability, but animal welfare is emerging as an additional parameter, and so are working conditions and pay in the industry. The Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative (GSSI), for example, derives benchmarking standards from FAO’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and other internationally -negotiated instruments. The sector has, all told, upped its game over the last decade or so. Mangrove destruction has not only decreased, but been partly reversed. And biosecurity, another of FAO’s areas of action, is more robust. On Thai prawn farms, for instance, the arrival of sophisticated water-exchange systems, the use of pond liners, and the introduction of biofloc – a technology that purifies sludge and excrement and turns it back into food – have greatly reduced viral outbreaks.