I almost forgot: a little birdy tells me that you can find a full-text version of the recently-bowdlerized Freakonomics RSS feed at the following URL.
At the moment, the authors are asking a very good question: why are we eating so much more shrimp than we used to? Shrimp just isn’t very good relative to other seafood. But it’s everywhere.
Being the sort of blog that it is, I’m sure that the answer will be “because aquaculture and/or other factors have made the margins on shrimp much better”. I think the other half of the answer, likely to remain unblogged elsewhere, is that Americans are squeamish about seafood that tastes like seafood, and you can’t order chicken every time you go to Applebee’s.
I am guessing that it is because shrimp tails are natures answer to fish on a sick. Americans will always eat more of anything that is easy to pick up and shove in their mouths.
The evolution of shrimp aquaculture is now to the point where production costs of farmed shrimp are less than the cost of the destructive bottom trawling wild harvesting methods. This has induced a price war between aquaculture and wild shrimp producers where neither side has a significant profit margin, but the shrimp farmers are winning even in the face of tariff’s imposed by the US commercial shrimpers (they are 10% of the market and get the 7% or so tariff’s on much of the imported 90% of farmed shrimp — they actually get the money).
Shrimp farming has an FCR — food conversion ratio — (dry wt feed in / animal whole wt out) in the