mercy for the oceans (recipe: shrimp primavera with broccoli and olives)

I'm reading a book, the title of which will probably make some of my readers cringe: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Why am I reading this? Why why why...?

When I went vegan I instituted an unspoken moratorium against consuming the gory details of animal agriculture. I just couldn't handle it. I sobbed my way through Peaceable Kingdom and never could commit to that old standby, Meet Your Meat. A couple of years ago, a video circulated of a calf being born on the slaughter line. If you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, count yourself lucky. You can never un-see something like that.

Because I was vegan, I felt that I didn't need any more information about what happens in animal factories. I'd made the ultimate decision; I was no longer complicit. And when Eating Animals was released, I was still a vegetarian, so I didn't consider reading it. I simply did not need to be exposed to even more information that would make me even more ashamed to be a human being. But when I came across it at the library a few days ago, I decided to pick it up. Maybe I wanted to test myself. Maybe I wanted to see if I could be driven into vegetarianism again by the stark, destructive truths of the crimes committed in animal factories, or if I would simply feel relieved that I've found some semblance of a third way.

Nothing in this book is new to me. The difference between broilers and layers, and what happens to billions of male layer-types, and why the designations of "cage-free" and "free-range" are meaningless, and the calves who become veal, and the "wasted" dairy cows who become hamburger meat, and manure lagoons, and E. coli O157:H7, and sow crates, and stun tanks, and hide-rippers, and manipulations of light and feed, and why grain is bad for cows, and the destruction of the Amazon, and human rights abuses, and ammonia baths, and downers -- I'm aware of these horrors, as everyone should be.

I go far out of my way to support farms where these abuses do not occur. Still, there is a hard kernel of stubbornness in me that protests that any unnecessary death is a bad death. Probably there is less death in my pastured local pork than in my organic regional rice. But I have moments of hesitation every single time I eat meat.

So what am I getting out of this book? I'm halfway through, and I have to stop every few pages to breathe through my anger and disgust. But he has not yet admitted the cruelty inherent in a monocropped field of annual plants -- the animals destroyed, the soil destroyed, the cultures destroyed by mass dependency on industrial agriculture as a whole. I feel confident that he will end this book on behalf of vegetarianism, and while I can certainly relate to the impetus, I must protest the lack of attention paid to the other side of the equation.

But I must also question eating fish. Foer's got me there.

I can't decide how to explain this. Should I rattle off some horrifying, mind-numbing statistics? Okay, here are a few. It's likely we will see the collapse of edible stocks in our lifetime. On shrimp trawling operations, 80-90% of captured sea creatures are tossed overboard to die. Almost 150 different species of shark, rays, mackerel, turtles, birds, dolphins, and whales, many of which are endangered, are destroyed in tuna extraction. Tons upon tons of animals are pulled in on boats that only seek a single species. That's enough, I think. Unless you want to get into the issue of cruelty. Personally, I don't have the heart for it right now.

You might protest that you don't buy fish that is caught in such an unsustainable manner. But how do you know? Regulatory agencies are not to be trusted, and it's very difficult to find reliable information. When I buy pastured meat, I get to shake the hand of the person who raised those animals. I can see where the animals live and what they eat and even, if I wish, how they die. I live only an hour from the coast but I doubt this transparency is possible on even the most sustainable fishing operation. And on even the most eco-conscious operation I believe I'd find fish stomped to death, or allowed to die slowly over many hours; I might see an instrument resembling a pickax swung into fishes' living faces to pull them aboard.

It's nearly impossible to take responsibility -- to choose carefully, with consciousness -- for consumption of seafood. I've been fooling myself for some time that doing a quick search on Seafood Watch is enough. It's not. It's equatable to embracing the cage-free label -- hook, line, and sinker.

 So this might be my last seafood recipe. Not because it makes any difference for one person to boycott the industry, but because I just don't feel comfortable with all of the unknowns. Believe me, I wish I did. I love seafood. It was the hardest thing, the last thing, I gave up as a vegetarian. But I can't be complicit in the wholesale destruction of the oceans any more than I can support the modern CAFO. Let me know if that makes any sense.

Shrimp Primavera with Broccoli and Olives
12 oz. pasta (I use brown rice penne)
3 T. pastured butter
2 T. olive oil
6 garlic cloves, sliced
1/2 red onion, sliced
1 c. cherry tomatoes, halved (canned tomatoes are fine; drain well)
1 1/2 c. plain whole-milk yogurt
1/2 c. Parmesan cheese, shredded
1 lb. large shrimp, peeled
1 head broccoli, chopped into florets
1 c. mixed olives, sliced if you wish

Set a large pot of water to boil. Heat the butter and oil in a large, deep skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and onion and cook until soft. Add the tomatoes, yogurt, and cheese. Let simmer for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, put the pasta in the pot with a pinch of salt. Pack the broccoli into a steamer basket and suspend it over the pasta pot. Cover the steamer basket and steam the broccoli until bright green and just barely soft, about 8 minutes. Remove the broccoli basket and continue to cook the pasta according to package instruction. Drain the pasta and set aside.

Stir the shrimp into the cream mixture and cook for 3-5 minutes, until pink and beginning to curl up. Add the broccoli and pasta and stir to combine. Taste and add salt and black pepper as needed.

Scoop out the primavera onto plates and sprinkle olives over the top along with a fresh grating of Parmesan.