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DIGESTED DIGEST THE PRAWN PRISM Subhead Where doe
s our food come from? It is an ancient and natural question, even if our age of industrial agriculture, global supply chains, and corporate retail often alienates us from the answers. We normally think about it in physical terms: where and how was it grown? How did it get here? Who sold it to me? But the roots of our food go much deeper. Why we eat certain things, how we produce them, and their spread across the globe are all part of complex and fascinating histories. To truly consider the sources of our food, we need to think about time as well as space. The past is booming across the food world. Restaurant menus and concepts are drawing on historic recipes; food TV programmes feature segments on historic dishes; and the news media can’t resist (often misleading) stories about what people used to eat. Focusing on the past, however, can come at the expense of thinking about history. Anecdotes attract our attention but limit our understanding when they ignore context. ‘Tradition’ preserves one past but flattens others by ignoring change. When our interest is only superficial we don’t notice that what seems old can often be much newer than we think, and that what is new is part of a much longer history that we are still living and eating. So how can we think more historically about our food? Perhaps one way to start is to consider one of our oldest foods. Prawns (or shrimp) have been around for about 500 million years, and people have been eating them for thousands. All across the world the little crustaceans were part of bigger histories. For the ancient Greeks they could be a symbol of power (the best allegedly came from Iasos in modern-day Turkey, where prawns featured on the city’s coins). In medieval Europe they were a treat on the many ‘fast’ days when meat, dairy, and eggs were forbidden. 34 Many traditional shrimp recipes chart the spread of global imperialism, from the fascinating story of Mexican aguachile, to the ndolé of Cameroon (the country’s name itself taken from the Portuguese word for prawn), to Japanese ebi tempura (possibly inspired by Portuguese Jesuits). In the rise of the American Gulf ’s shrimp canning industry we can see the history of industrial capitalism, from the exploitation of child labour for peeling prawns to class and racial conflicts over jobs and resources. Here in Ireland, too, prawns have been caught and eaten for centuries, from Down to Dublin, Waterford to Cork, Galway to Kerry. In true Irish fashion, our most famous prawn is not actually a prawn at all, but a small lobster, the ‘langoustine’ or ‘Dublin Bay prawn’ (the name comes from the practice of secretly offloading them in the bay before boats reached harbour, in order to sell them on the sly). They are our most valuable seafood product, and we sadly export almost all that we catch, as we do our native Irish ‘common prawns’. Indeed, as Corinna Hardgrave wrote in The Irish Times in 2021, there is now very little chance of eating an Irish prawn in Ireland. The destination for our prawns - as with most of our seafood - is southern Europe, where langoustines and other shellfish are loved and celebrated. But even there, our assumptions about what is ancient and traditional can be misleading. The famed ancient Roman gourmand Apicius supposedly sought out the largest prawns off the coast of Libya (and was unimpressed), but the iconic status of the Mediterranean red prawns - like those of Mazara del Vallo and Palamós - comes only from recent decades, after fishermen began deep trawling for them in the mid-twentieth century. As demand for prawns soared, massive fraud and overfish