My life changed in an instant. I was visiting home during a college break and saw a bumper sticker on my best friend’s car. Love Animals Don’t Eat Them. And I instantly felt like a fool because I loved cats and dogs but was eating cows, pigs, chickens, and fish. Why was one group sacred and the other……. delicious? So I immediately stopped eating meat to the approval of my peers and the horror of my mother. And did this without fail for 15 years until… I discovered Mexico.
That was in 1988, when I was 35 years old, and watching my ex-wife and friends enjoy tacos two-for-a-dollar with their eyes rolling back in their heads like a hammerhead eating a seal during Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. I resisted until I finally broke down. In part because of my frugal Scottish heritage that can’t pass up a bargain but also because Mexican food was my favorite food from childhood. So I started eating fish and shellfish. Mexico broke me. And, yes, I do realize that fish, since they travel in schools, obviously value higher education.
I started with fish tacos, of course, at the stands outside the fish market with all their salsas beautifully displayed in glass bowls. My favorite is Tacos Lily. Tried ceviche and loved it. Found chile rellenos stuffed with smoked marlin. Campechanas. Calimari tacos. Almeja gratinadas. Salmon tacos. Siete Mares soup. And fell hard for all things shrimp with tacos, aquachile, cocktails, ceviche, you name it. La Avioneta alone has five different kinds of shrimp tacos — breaded, with peppers, ranchero, a la diabla, and gobernador. And I go light on the condiments because I don’t want to hide the taste of the shrimp. (Salmon, with its strong taste? Sure, pile on the cilantro and chiles.) And, now, at home I routinely eat cooked shrimp, cold, without the tails, and dipped in one of the seven salsa machas that are in my fridge.
Shrimp are omnivores, scavengers who don’t limit their diet to plant matter. They can live up to seven years and are farm grown as well as wild harvested. And they travel in large “schools” during their spawning season so once again I am depriving others of a quality education. HOW CAN I GIVE BACK? At the end of my years the readers of the Gringo Gazette have my permission to haul my withered carcass out into the bay and heave me overboard. But, please, tie a big rock to my ankle so I sink to the bottom and don’t horrify the cruise ship passengers as they pull into port. And let the shrimp have at me. Fair is fair.
Am I serious about this? Only half. I don’t want to be buried. That just takes up land that has to be tended for centuries. I don’t want to be cremated and put into a niche with the rest of my family. If I get cremated I want my ashes spread somewhere outdoors. But not on a windy day. I once read a story about a guy who was scattering his father’s ashes on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It was windy and the ashes flew into everyone’s faces. He wrote “I was eating my father.” So… me, a few of you, a rented boat? Plus, I’m a devoted recycler. Aren’t you?
