That circled blur is a live shrimp jumping out of a bowl, trying to escape being our dinner.
Last week we posted video of us eating drunken shrimp, the notorious Chinese dish where live shrimp are soaked in alcohol, then eaten while still twitching. Frankly, the dish is sort of like gastro-date rape: You get the shrimp hammered enough to impair their mobility and then take advantage by forcing them down your throat. Which is probably how drunken shrimp ended up on the list of the “Cruelest Dishes in China.”
To find out how guilty we should feel about eating still-living shrimp, we asked Emma Creaser, an associate professor of marine physiology at Unity College and our go-to expert for all matters involving the mastication of live sea creatures, to tell us how much pain the creatures would have been feeling. Here’s what she said:
“Alcohol is often used as an anesthetic for invertebrates, including shrimp, in biology. We judge them to be anesthetized when they stop wiggling or ‘trying to escape.’ For your meal it would thus depend on how long you let the shrimp sit in the alcohol, and thus how wiggly it still was before you ate it. Shrimp have some concentration of nerves into centralized knots, but whether they ‘feel’ pain, even sober, with the same angst as we do is unknown. However, you might console yourself by remembering that shrimp are eaten alive by almost all of their other predators.”
Since our shrimp bathed in booze for a good 20 minutes, and they seemed pretty mellow-yellow when we ate them, we’re categorizing them as “highly anesthetized.” Plus we take comfort in the reminder that shrimp are routinely eaten alive by other predators.
At least we were thoughtful enough to buy them a drink first.
To watch our video of the shrimp hopping out of their bowl and into our mouths, click here.
