Numlock Sunday: Paris Martineau on those radioactive shrimp

Photo by Fernando Andrade on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to the great Paris Martineau who wrote What Is Really Going on With All This Radioactive Shrimp? for Consumer Reports. Here’s what I wrote about it:

In just the past six weeks, hundreds of thousands of pounds of shrimp have been pulled from supermarkets because they may be radioactive. All the shrimp were processed by BMS Foods in Indonesia, which was singlehandedly responsible for a third of all Indonesian shrimp imports from January to July. After cesium-137 was detected in the company’s shipping containers at four ports, Indonesia’s nuclear agency launched an investigation and found widespread contamination in the Cikande industrial area where the shrimp was packaged. The source of the contamination is a nearby steel manufacturer. Investigators think that the steel company smelted some cesium-137 (perhaps from a medical device) and dusted the region in the process, affecting at least 10 sites in a three-mile radius, including the one where these shrimp come from.

I mean, come on, radioactive shrimp? You have my full attention. Please tell me everything.

Paris can be found at Consumer Reports where she covers the food system.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Paris, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks so much for having me.

You wrote about a really fascinating story for Consumer Reports — about a story that maybe popped on some people’s radar, and then people were like, “huh,” and then moved on. But you didn’t move on. Do you want to talk a little bit about the radioactive shrimp situation?

Yeah, when I was explaining this story to a friend at a bar, as one does before it ends up publishing. I think a friend put it succinctly: I always thought the fact that shrimp was radioactive was wild, but I never imagined there’d be an answer as to why the shrimp could be radioactive.

For some context, I’ve covered tech journalism primarily for the last decade. In July, I started a new beat at Consumer Reports, running their investigation team. Still doing some tech, but my primary focus, at least for the present, is going to be food safety issues. One aspect of that job means that if there’s a food recall or something, if it’s notable, if it’s something we think our readers should be aware of, I’ll write it up.

It’s interesting, because I’ve immediately got what some people here at CR say are “the strangest batch of food recalls the company’s ever seen.” CR’s been around for like 100 years, and many of my colleagues have worked here for like 25+ years. I reached out to them when the first radioactive shrimp recall hit, and I was like, “Hey, I’m new to this beat, this seems a little weird, right?”

They were like, “We’ve never had a food recall for cesium-137 in our records”. As it spawned from one recall to two, three, going on 10 if you count all the different updates, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on.

I started to do some digging, and it ended up taking me to Indonesia, specifically the island of Java, in an industrial area called Cikande. This is what Indonesian investigators currently believe: an industrial accident happened at a smelting metal processing facility there that resulted in radioactive debris of cesium-137 (a radioactive isotope) being dusted around the surrounding area, and potentially areas hundreds of miles away.

It seems like it actually, you did manage to resolve this to a place, which I think a lot of times with these stories, people don’t necessarily think they can be. It seems like not only did you manage to find exactly where this went down, but also, there’s a steel plant in question, you know?

Yeah, I think it all really came together for me (mentally at least) when I opened up Google Maps and plugged in the address of the place where the shrimp was processed, BMS Foods. Then I plugged in the address of the steel factory at Peter Metal Technologies and looked, and I was like, Oh, these are like a mile and a half away from each other. Of course this would make sense that this contamination would happen here.

At the time I started digging into this, there hadn’t been really much English-language coverage of this at all, really, outside of maybe one story in the AP a couple of weeks ago. So a lot of it was trying to figure out the best way to translate Indonesian. There had been (obviously) some great reporting, which I cite in my piece by Indonesian news outlets, as well as just a flurry of press releases from Indonesia’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the Environmental Ministry. But all in Indonesian, of course. I don’t speak Indonesian, and I had to search around for a translator. I think we went with a combination of AI-powered translation, and they’re getting spot checks from people actually familiar with the language to make sure that we aren’t misinterpreting anything.

But a lot of it really involves just digging into some of these primary or secondary sources and calling people up, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, and just making sure that we were aware of what these various government agencies were trying to find out.

I think the thing that was so interesting about this to me is that it’s a story that is very much still in flux. I was on the phone many times over the weekend with nuclear safety experts and professors and whatnot. They were like, “We have no idea what’s going on. I mean, it’s too soon to tell.”

The pattern of contamination looks one way, but until we know specifically what date they think this furnace allegedly incinerated a metal that contains cesium-137, we can’t map out the pattern of radiation. It could be any number of ways that these various products ended up getting contaminated, which I think is just a very interesting story to tell for me as a journalist. I love it when there are unanswered questions.

It’s also really revelatory about just how the supply chain works. It just happened, it seems, at maybe one of the worst possible choke points for the entire shrimp supply chain.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. Indonesia is the third-largest supplier of shrimp to the U.S., which, again, I didn’t realize how big imported shrimp was to begin with. I didn’t realize that Indonesia was the third-largest. And of course, it makes intuitive sense that you’d have one company that is responsible for a huge chunk of this, BMS Foods in this case. Much like a lot of the supply chain issues we saw during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this just really opened my eyes to the way in which we are globally connected via trade to far-flung places.

I think the thing that struck me about the list of recalls originally is just how pervasive these products were. I think the first company that issued a recall was Walmart’s Great Value brand frozen shrimp.

It’s, of course, not all of their shrimp, but a good chunk of it happened to come from this one supplier. The FDA originally detected these elevated levels in the shrimp, then issued a blanket ban or barring of products from this company. Then they seem to have tried to go back through the supply chain, figure out where all this company’s products ended up, and then direct those companies to issue recalls. That process has taken like seven weeks, and it still may be ongoing, which I think really speaks to how complicated these supply chains can get.

I do want to take a moment here to be like, it’s okay to find this story somewhat amusing, because this is not in fact dangerous, right? The levels that they detected are not bad.

Yes, I think that’s something that’s really important. Everybody sees radioactive shrimp and is like, “Oh my god, radioactive shrimp?” Borrowing language from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, “Am I going to turn to the alien from Alien?” No, you’re not going to turn to the alien from Alien. You’ll be fine, seemingly. These two levels detected in these products by the FDA, at least that we know of, are 68 becquerels per kilogram and 732 becquerels per kilogram. That is way below the FDA’s derived intervention limit for cesium-137, which is 1,200 becquerels per kilogram.

What the experts tell me is that at these levels, those products do not cause acute harm to anybody. It’s more of an issue, as with any radionuclide like this, that if you’re exposed to low levels of radiation every day over a long period of time, that can cause damage to your DNA or body or cause more downstream effects.

But the main thing about this is it’s low levels. These recalls were done out of an abundance of caution, and it’s all right to poke a little fun at it and marvel at the incident.

Yes, you have to have a disastrous commitment to endless shrimp to really make a health impact out of this one.

Yeah, you’ve got to be going through quite a lot of pounds of shrimp for it to become a serious problem.

I really liked it a lot because we can do radioactive tracking where you are able to track items through a supply chain by putting an innocuous bit of radiation on it, right? And, this story did do that accidentally.

Yeah, it’s very interesting to see the way that all these different agencies and parts of the world are working together to either address this or figure out a response to it. I guess on the further end of the don’t be alarmed consumers aspect, the most recent move is the FDA put import certification restrictions on all all shrimp and spice products coming from this region. They’ve got an abundance of caution. Basically anyone who wants to send stuff to the U.S. from this area that could be contaminated now has to have an extra certificate saying, “Hey, we definitely don’t have radiation.” So the goods should continue to be good.

That’s exciting, you always like to see that. It is good to know that these processes do work and they’re very effective.

Backing out a bit, this is a really fun and exciting beat for you. Again, I followed your work for a while, and this is definitely something a bit new and doubling down on some stuff that I’ve seen you in a little bit in the past. What got you particularly interested in working on the food beat, particularly for an institution like Consumer Reports?

When I was interviewing for this position, I was going back through Consumer Reports archives, and I was just struck by the legacy of really impactful work in regards to making the world a better place. But specifically in regard to improving conditions for consumers and people generally. One of the really interesting ways that CR has historically been able to do that is through tackling the food supply chain.

I think, given the current tumult in the US government, I thought that this is a really important time to be scrutinizing the supply chain for food and scrutinizing the regulatory world around food safety. In part because, as I’ve been just getting up to speed on history, the FDA has often come under fire or experienced criticism for its approach to food regulation in comparison to drug regulation.

Neither is going to be impervious to criticism, but it’s always been a little iffy over the years, based on the agency’s staffing priorities and ability to get things done. And that was all before massive layoffs hit all parts of the government, including the FDA and USDA. So I feel like this is just a very important moment to have as many watchdog eyes on these aspects of both regulatory action and corporate action. And I’m just really excited to dig into that. That’s awesome.

That’s so cool to hear. You’re right — what is the line between what you can eat and what you can’t eat, and what you can sell and what you can’t sell is just such a deeply entrenched question in so much of American life. I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Yeah, me too.

All right. So where can folks find you, and where can they find your work?

You can find me on BlueSky @paris.nyc. Paris.nyc is also my website; it’s got information about us, or just contact me. You can find my articles on consumerreports.org.

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Edited by Crystal Wang