Dirty Shrimp and Cultural Myths

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My wife and I were making lunch, a nice tomato sauce ravioli, and she asks me a funny little questions regarding the shrimp she was about to add.

”Is the black stuff in the shrimp really bad to eat?”

She was referring to the little black goo you find when you slice along the backside of the shrimp. Korean mothers will tell you that you have to remove that bit because it contains bacteria and poo and all manner of strange stuff that you don’t want to be eating.

I did a quick Google and found this -

This confirmed my hunch that this, alongside many anecdotes, are one of many “wives tales” concerning food and sanitariness. Others include needing to remove the peel on all fruits, including apples and pears, and chucking out the little white goo of an egg yolk. For some reason(s), these sensibilities have been passed down (usually maternally) and upheld even by our generations today.

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I bring this up to stir a conversation around cultural daily myths - the little, almost innocuous sensibilities that are not rooted in rationale, driven by historical anecdotes and experiences, and nevertheless influence the way we live our lives. I’m a pretty big believer of the butterfly effect and how nuanced cultural attitudes can compound into unstoppable consequences. For example, eating a hamburger as a typical lunch is pretty normal. But if an American family ritualizes meat eating (as many do), that habit can stack up (get it?) to produce systemic issues across different households. I’m curious to see if my hunch is correct and that many other cultures have these little ticks that help differentiate one way of life from another.

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I think the reasons are diverse and very difficult to trace back to any real origin. Maybe there was a small Korean epidemic concerning shrimp that caused some irrational panic of the black goo. Maybe there was some economic tension with shellfish imports from the Philippines and a bit of state propaganda deterred people from the seafood. Maybe some street sage just conjured it up one day and the gossip spread like wildfire. Most likely is that this particular wives tale didn’t stem from any real Ground 0 but flourished in this weird network of the game “Telephone,” causing some cumulative idea that something is bad or some things should be done a certain particular way.

The next step from these little sensibilities is obviously superstitions. My mother always told me not to whistle at night as it would cause ghosts to appear. I found out later that this is a universal word of caution amongst all Koreans. I, being the stubborn American-born in the family, continued to whistle gleefully come nightfall. I found more and more of these as I paid attention and again, am curious if you all have grown up with these little things that you have debunked since.

Steem on!