Celebrate our seafood

Last week you read about the problem brought to our attention about shrimp from other places being sold at festivals right here in Terrebonne parish, which is the shrimp basket of Louisiana despite the very best efforts of almost everyone to deny this as part of our heritage and an integral part of who we are today.

Right now, as these words are being written, men and women are out on the bays lakes and in the open Gulf of Mexico, harvesting what they can of what shrimp is out there, not as a hobby or because they have nothing better to do, but because this is how families have been raised, colleges and cars paid for, and how many other good things have happened here.

But we remain detached from this part of our being, despite what should be an understanding that if you eliminate the shrimp boats from the bayous you lose an integral part of a local skyline, as sure as if the skyline of New York City was reduced to tenement houses and the landmark structures like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building no longer existed.

Our failure to acknowledge our seafood heritage has resulted in key parts of the seafood infrastructure to dissolve. Witness how we are losing shrimp processing plants, the same way we lost sugar mills over time. Witness the jobs we have lost, jobs that could have gone to people thrown onto the unemployment lines by the fickle nature of oil, which we appear to worship.

Yet an understanding that at a Terrebonne Parish festival celebrating local culture anyone would dare to sell shrimp or shrimp products coming from a feces-infested overseas pond should be beyond imagination never registered until now. Unbelievable.

For all the festivals we have been sponsoring and developing, there is not a one that focuses on seafood. In Monterey, Ca. they have a sardine festival, and the sardines haven’t been to Monterey Bay since the time of Steinbeck. But that fishery is so much a part of the culture they still do it. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina and on the Sea Islands of South Carolina there are seafood festivals because the people respect how they neighbors make a living and know it should be cherished.

Perhaps this is in part the fault of our shrimp people and crab people, who trend to keep to themselves and avoid coming to Houma as much as possible, sometimes with very good reason. But the outreach has to begin. The oyster industry, which has made pioneering strides in our area, does not have a festival. We seem to leave all of this to New Orleans when we could be attracting people here to celebrate the shrimp and the crab and the oyster right in the place where they come from.

So a good start to all this will be the Parish Council taking a firm stand and not just passively checking to see if a rule can be made, but aggressively making things happen for a rule to be made, that if you are going to call something a festival here you had better use wild-caught US shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico, and no more of this allowing shrimp that is packaged by the people of Kim Jong Un during field trips to China onto our streets. I’m not exaggerating about Kim Jong Un. A recent Associated Press report – some brilliant investigative work – has proved that people who are little more than slaves from North Korea are sent to China to work in the shrimp ponds. And where does most of that shrimp go? It comes right here because our country thinks more of seafood brokers up north who drive big fancy cars than it does a shrimper with callouses and a put-put boat on Bayou Little Caillou. We eat it. The Rocket Man’s minions could do all kinds of stuff to that shrimp and we would never know about it. Where does the money go? To build this animal’s nukes.

But once we do this there need to be plans for a festival, a big old festival that we could have on our waterfront. Anne Picou who does a great job with downtown may be hatching some thoughts about this now and people should help her out. Let’s start utilizing our downtown waterfront for something besides floating a big old plastic alligator. Let’s use it to promote our men and women in the seafood service, who have built this place and keep it running. Let people tour a shrimp boat. Let them know what the real deal is. Before it’s too late and there’s nothing left to celebrate.

John DeSantis