As shrimp season starts, The Daily Beast tested the Gulf's seafood for oil and dispersant, and the results were immaculate. If Gulf and Atlantic seafood are equally safe, why won't America buy?
Louisiana shrimpers should have celebrated last week. White shrimp season started just as BP’s contractors moved to seal the well that has spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf that gives them their livelihood. Yet the mood on the bayou, by all accounts, was deflated: America has shunned Gulf seafood, adding yet another blow to an economically devastated region.
So is the caution among America’s seafood consumers justified? Seeking a definitive answer to the question, The Daily Beast commissioned an independent lab, one of a handful certified to measure chemical dispersants, to analyze a cross-section of Gulf seafood—red grouper, jumbo shrimp, and crabmeat—for both oil and the dispersants that have prompted almost as much alarm as the petroleum itself. To further sharpen the test, we also performed similar tests on samples of those three types of seafood culled from the Atlantic Ocean.
The results? Immaculate. As with the Atlantic samples, all of the Gulf seafood contained either undetectable or incredibly minute (well below everyday federal thresholds) levels of petroleum hydrocarbons or dispersants.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Daily Beast.
