Oil spill-related fish shortage harbinger of things to come

The price of shrimp is up 50 cents a pound at Ruth's seafood stand in the Westwego fish market, just outside of New Orleans, La. And this could be just the beginning. Among my friends and fellow sustainable food nuts, there is a dark humor when it comes to seafood: we can't decide if we should eschew it entirely due to concerns of calamitous global overfishing, or get it while we can.

Estimates from environmentalists and fisheries experts range from 10 to 30 years before many large species of fish are gone entirely, leaving mostly inedible and tiny 'nuisance' species; and these estimates did not take into account an explosion in the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leaking an unknown and currently unstoppable quantity of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, wreaking havoc that is only beginning to affect prime breeding grounds for shrimp, oysters and crawfish.