Bastard crustaceans and crusty bastards
Bastard crustaceans and crusty bastards
Someone asked me to write about shrimp made from algae last week, which is how I found out that we are now making shrimp from algae. The first thing that came to mind was my late grandfather. He was an eater of rare quality, combining capacity, finesse, discernment, and gusto in equal measure, and his favorite place on earth was this restaurant called Ah Hoi. Ah Hoi himself had come from the same village as my grandmother, and when I was growing up it was one of the mainstays of Teochew cooking in Singapore. It was a down to earth kind of place, built after the war and kept well scrubbed, with white tablecloths that had been laundered to a gauze. The spittoons under each table had been removed shortly before I was born. This was the kind of place where it was expected that your shrimp shells and duck bones would be piled right on the table next to your plate, and every table in the house acquired magnificent piles of debris over the course of a meal.
I don’t think anyone but his family knew Ah Hoi’s real name, and even they called him Ah Hoi, which in English would be the equivalent of calling someone “Crabs,” as in, “Hey Crabs! I need fried rice for Table 4!” Naturally, one of the specialties of the house was cold crab, hacked in pieces then steamed and brought to the table not quite fridge cold but certainly cellar cool, with a saucer of a condiment with no English name(1). The only tools you got were your blunt fake ivory chopsticks, each the diameter of a #2 pencil. The rest of the struggle was between your mouth parts, the crab, and your dignity. It was utterly naked and utterly simple and the kind of thing that could only count as a celebration if you came from a tiny fishing village on the wrong end of a poor coastal province in China, and it was one of my grandfather’s favorite things to eat.
By the end of his life, my grandfather was solidly in the middle class. He’d sent four of his five kids to university, the first generation in the family ever to go. He’d come to Malaya as a rawboned immigrant and worked his way up in an old kongsi(2) from company cook to accountant. Between his career and the industrialization of Southeast Asia, he could have ordered cold crabs every week, if my grandma and his cardiologist would let him. The feast of the fishing village whence he’d come, made commonplace by the arc of history and his own effort. In some sense, he’d worked his entire life so that he could, if he wanted (and if only my grandma and his cardiologist would let him) spend an hour every Sunday worrying cold crab meat off the shell. He ate it because his ancestors were fisherfolk and this was the feast they could afford. Eating it was a celebration not just of an occasion, but also of ingenuity and resilience and having gotten the fuck out. Today we realize that maybe he was just lucky to have been born at a time when he could get the fuck out.
The people currently working on artificial shrimp do not plan to grow the shells. Why make something that’s only going to get thrown away? Their CEO makes breathless pronouncements about the effortless perfection of each piece. They’re certainly not going to be engineering shrimp heads anytime soon either, and when they inevitably get round to crab and lobster, I somehow think they’ll only be making claws and tails.
We’re not trying to grow whole crabs because they’re not profitable enough. It’s why my grandfather’s grandfather could afford them in the first place. We aren’t growing shrimp heads because we trained much of the global north(3) into thinking that they’re gross. We’re not trying to synthesize fish sauce or belacan, though those would be much easier technical challenges, and more important to a greater segment of the world’s population. We’re trying to synthesize peeled, headless, tailless, shrimp, because this is what Americans want to eat.
There is a sense in which shrimp grown from algae are an attempt to provide my grandfather’s experience to the people of the next generation, the next millions who will come up from poverty - and the next millions who will be ground down into the underclass by the miracle of the modern economy. When scarcity, overfishing, and climate change have made it so that only the richest of the rich can afford food that actually came from an animal, we will be able to feed everyone else this vat grown shrimp. We’re throwing technology at the problem, but the reason we have a problem at all is that our vision of prosperity is little blotchy pink crescents with no awkward bits, and that’s a root cause we really don’t want to deal with.
I try to imagine explaining to my grandfather that he didn’t get to eat all the crabs he wanted, not because grandma and his cardiologist wouldn’t let him, but because someone else fucked up and there were none left. Because what looked like prosperity to him turned out to be nothing but the foothills of a very high mountain indeed, and the people who climbed it first were now dancing on everyone else’s heads, and he had to stick with dried fish and yams because they were better for the planet. And I think about how my grandfather had a real temper on him, and hope that those nice people in Silicon Valley hurry up and figure out how to synthesize crabs as well.
(1) In Teochew, this is called gik yew, literally tangerine oil, and it is a light-bodied, tangy condiment made from small mandarins or tangerines.
(2) A kongsi, literally company, generally refers to an old school family-owned trading firm.
(3) I’m borrowing the term from Fabio Parasecoli, who wrote an excellent volume on Food for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. It’s coming out this spring, and is, well, essential.
Youtube rabbit hole of the week
I’ve been working at the intersection of food, logistics, and manufacturing for a while. Among the bad habits I did not expect to pick up was that of browsing videos of food-processing machines on youtube after the third mezcal or so. Fortunately or otherwise this isn’t a frequent circumstance, but the rabbit hole is deep and delightful (at least, if you like watching really complicated machines while they make inferior versions of things you make by hand). The genre is a big tent, including everything from semi-polished manufacturer's advertorials for frankly terrifying machines:
to blissfully artless demonstrations of a steamed bun production line filmed on an early Huawei phone (what are they selling? The machines? The buns? The factory itself? Who knows!).
And because this is a genre on youtube, there are, inevitably, fan compilations (I particularly recommend the dumpling machine at 8:57 and the baumkuchen machine at 11:08).
Thank you for reading an alpha issue of let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. If you’re enjoying - or not enjoying - this newsletter, do drop me a line! I am looking for all the feedback I can get, and I love requests for essays about specific topics.