There are some things that transport you back to your childhood years. For you, they may be an old TV show’s theme song, the sight of your first stuffed toy, or the taste of your family’s signature dish. I relate to all of those, but there are few things that bring me back like peeling a good shrimp. When cooking around the different coasts of Latin America, my mom handed that dirty work to me because it allowed her to prep the rest of the kitchen while I did it. Through a lifetime of experience being my mom’s kitchen assistant, I have ingrained it into my habitus to behead, shuck, pair and devein whole shrimp in record time. Having always admired crustaceans, there is a sad comfort and intimacy in the crack, the smell, the texture, and the ability to get to see such amazing creatures from up close, which used to be a thing that only happened once every month for me.
But suddenly I started to see shrimp a lot more when my dad’s hobby turned a good chunk of my house into multiple aquariums. Now there I was with an aquarium just for me, that I could fill with any fish I wanted. But I didn’t want fish, I wanted shrimp, and many of them. So I got ghost shrimp, crawfish, and cherry shrimp of all different colours. I spent the larger part of the pandemic taking care of them, feeding them religiously, cleaning their tank, checking their water conditions, and constantly improving their tank so they each had their own personal shelters. I fell in love with them, and on the rare occasion that one passed, I would grieve them for days. Sometimes my mom would see me so sad that she would invite me to cook shrimp together just to lift my spirits. The hypocrisy of this was not above me, but there was just something keeping me hooked on shrimp.
I’ve spent the last years trying to reconcile with this hypocrisy, justifying it in almost every way possible. “It’s our God-Given right”, “They can’t feel emotions”, “Everyone does it”, “A predator would have eaten them otherwise”. Not one of these felt right, none of them holds up when I remember my beloved pets, nor when I eat my favourite meals. Their bodies are to me like the water they live in and the oil in which I cook them, an irreconcilable dualism of bodies to nurture and to be nurtured by. Yet, in all my attempts to justify this hypocrisy, there is one rationale that persists: the deep sense of cultural identity tied to shrimp consumption.
Despite this internal conflict, it feels to me like shrimp are more than just the material bodies they inhabit, they are intrinsically woven into the person I see myself as. Growing up in different coastal cities around Latin America, shrimp have been a symbolically important aspect of how I define myself. Shrimp are in the dishes I cook, but also in the music I listen to, the sayings I use, the stories I tell, and the jokes I hear. One particular joke was sure to be told exactly the same anytime I told anyone that I owned shrimp: “You should cook them in garlic and olive oil”. It’s like it came preprogrammed into the people I interacted with, and through them, into me. Especially now living away from home, I look for ways to be more Latino, to be the home I miss, and in those moments the joke resonates with me, telling me who I’m supposed to be.
But deep down, I know I'm not supposed to be anything. There are many aspects of my cultures that I can take from, some of them lovely, some of them violent. And there is a certain violence inherent to peeling those bodies that could have been my pets, to eating them by the dozen in one sitting, to boiling their shells to extract their essence, their souls, to discard them. I’ve been trying to stay away from that violence lately.
While I appreciate the significance that shrimp have in my sense of self, I also recognise that I am not my heritage alone. My identity can be formed by my evolving understanding of what it means to live with compassion for the bodies around me. I try to forge a future that reflects the kind of person I want to be, and even when I falter, I keep trying because I know that I can be more than what I’m supposed to be.
Image: Alžbeta Szabová
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