Shrimp is fancy food for anyone’s dinner table. Boiled, baked, grilled, poached… the culinary possibilities are almost endless, and the low price of shrimp at grocers and superstores makes it easy for us to keep on eating. Yet this abundance of shrimp obscures the true costs of the competing industries that keep supermarkets and restaurants supplied, and those stories are at the center of Jack and Anne Rudloe’s new book Shrimp: The Endless Quest for Pink Gold.

To be honest, I almost shelved this book without finishing it. After an interesting autobiographical introduction about what it is like to work on a shrimp boat, the book attempts to give readers a crash course on the history of shrimping, shrimp taxonomy,