This was meant to be a consolation meal. Back when I thought I’d miss a big party with D where the invite said the dinner menu would include shrimp and grits, I was feeling pretty mopey. It’s one thing to be 3,000 miles from your honey, and another to be 3,000 miles from your honey AND the most perfect food combination that humans ever invented.
Grits are one of my favorite mushy carbs, and mushy carbs happen to be my favorite category of food. Rice, porridge, oats, polenta, risotto, I love the cozy embrace of all of them. A spoonful of hot cheesy grits is like taking off your bra and putting on your fluffiest pair of sweats after a long day, or if it’s an East Coast summer where you are right now, like taking off your bra and firing up the ac after a long day. And is there anything better than the sweet crunch of a first bite into a big prawn? No, is the answer to that! Shrimp made well is both crispy on that first bite and then juicy and tender on every subsequent one. The combination of those two contrasting ingredients together is an actual love story.
But as much as I love shrimp and grits, I actually try to avoid it. I’ve been trying to return shrimp to its status as a special occasion food, and discourage myself from thinking of it as the everyday item it’s seemed to become in food media over the years. Having a tiny understanding of the environmental impact of overfishing influenced my feelings, as did this vital AP investigation on the actual slave labor which powered, and very likely still props up, the industry. So I try (and regularly fail, let’s be clear) to avoid shrimp. I usually do okay, or whatever, just fine enough not to hide under my bed all day though what kind of metric is that? But then again, I’m still eating plenty of meat, buying bagged snacks, using single use plastic for produce at the grocery store, and generally clogging up the oceans with the detritus of my convenience-focused life. Sometimes I’ll see people going nuts on gourmet sushi dinners and I’ll think fuck, if THEY can happily gorge on the last of the planet’s edible seafood, why can’t I? And it’s usually only after 10 minutes of that kind of stewing that I check myself and realize I need to log off.
I’m pretty sure this environmental guilt and gourmet food jealousy and my uneven attempts at seafood asceticism have only ratcheted up the mystical allure of shrimp and grits in my food imagination. The thing is saddling oneself with personal environmental guilt feels like both a scam–what we need are huge structural changes from corporations and governments–and also, truly overdue. What if we DID unite to turn away from single use plastic? From our cars? From keeping the office thermostat at 65F? From eating so much goddamn delicious shrimp? It’s not everything, certainly, but it’d be something.
So what’d I do a few weeks ago? I slowly went about acquiring the necessary ingredients for this dish. The grits were already in my cupboard, the shrimp and the bacon weren’t. Bacon! I haven’t even gotten to bacon guilt. And then I made this dish. And you know what the funny thing is? D ended up changing my ticket so I could stay and I made it to the party after all. I had my shrimp and grits twice, and you know what? Both versions were just okay. (I overcooked my shrimp! They were as chewy as chicken hearts!!) The brisket they served at the party was even better. And I felt so much sorrow for our planet with every single bite I took.