‘Seaspiracy’ On Netflix Will Convince You To Never Eat Shrimp Again

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, the new Netflix documentary Seaspiracy absolutely should have been called ConspiraSEA. No question about it, that is a missed opportunity for a groan-worthy (and therefore excellent) bit of wordplay.

But there is a perfectly logical reason Netflix dropped the ball: Seaspiracy is brought to you by the same people who brought you the controversial Netflix documentary Cowspiracy. Clearly, the streaming service opted for parallelism over puns. But the larger point here is: Get your tweets about the Seaspiracy/ConspiraSEA thing out of your system and then actually watch this Netflix documentary, because Seaspiracy makes some shocking accusations against the commercial fishing industry, including corruption, cover-ups, and even slavery. If what this movie says is true, you’re absolutely going to want to hear about this. And then you’re never going to eat shrimp cocktail or sushi again.

Seaspiracy director Ali Tabrizi had no idea what he was getting into when he first set out to make a documentary about marine life. He’d loved whales and dolphins as a child, and, as an adult, he did what he could to help protect them. He carried reusable cutlery, attended beach clean-ups, and cold-called restaurants to ask them to eliminate plastic straws. Like the rest of us, he’d heard the often-repeated statistics about the Great Pacific garbage patch, “microplastics,” and the ways plastic straws were killing sea turtles.

But what started as a film about plastic pollution turned into something much darker. At first, the film feels scattered. We follow Tabrizi (who casts himself as the main character) as he films everything from dolphins being killed in Japan to sharks being de-finned in Hong Kong. It starts to take focus when he zooms out to take a larger look at the commercial fishing industry’s powerful influence on organizations Tabrizi used to trust.

In an astounding interview with Mark J. Palmer, the Associate Director of the International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute—the organization behind the “Dolphin Safe” label you see on tuna cans—Palmer admits, on camera, that the “Dolphin Safe” label does not guarantee dolphins were not harmed by the product. When Tabrizi presses him as to what the point of the label is, in that case, he fails to think of an adequate response beyond, “It’s not guaranteed in the same way that the world is a difficult place sometimes.”

Tabrizi takes this trend and runs with it. While perhaps too much time is spent playing “gotcha” on so-called non-profit organizations, his point is a good one: No one wants to talk about the devastating environmental impact caused by the largely unregulated fishing industry. In fact, some—like Diana Cohen, the CEO of Plastic Pollution Coalition—seem afraid to even suggest reducing fish intake as a means of environmental activism. Despite this, Tabrizi learns more and more about how damaging fishing practices are to the oceans, such as trawling, a method that involves scraping a net big enough to swallow a cathedral along the ocean floor, devastating entire continents of habitats in their path.

Then comes the most shocking part of the documentary: Tabrizi hears allegations that much of the shrimp industry relies on enslaved fishermen in southeast Asia. (An investigation by The Guardian published in 2018 backs this claim up.) Tabrizi decides he needs first-hand accounts from former slaves, and he gets them. Filmed anonymously in silhouette, Thai men attest to being held against their will on fishing boats for up to ten years, where they were physically beaten, splashed with boiling water, threatened, and saw dead bodies thrown overboard. “A lot of the seafood we’re consuming today is from slavery, from forced labor,” one man says.

That grotesque crime against humanity should be reason enough for most to reconsider seafood intake. (Especially shrimp, which is particularly reliant on slave labor, according to journalist George Monbiot.) But just in case, Tabrizi closes with some hard-to-watch footage of a bloody whale hunt on the Faroe Islands.

The solution to the environmental and humanitarian damage caused by the fishing industry, Tabrizi suggests, is to simply buy less fish. He highlights some businesses that sell plant-based fish alternatives and experts who attest to the fact that you won’t be missing out on much health-wise if you eliminate fish from your diet. It doesn’t feel like enough, given the horror just witnessed, not to mention the fact that, earlier in the film, we’d heard that the government subsidizes the fishing industry, meaning your taxes are supporting it whether you buy fish or not. But what else can be done? (You can sign up for the film’s newsletter, for now.)

At the very least, we can watch Tabrizi’s film and take these allegations seriously. It’s true that Kip Andersen, who produced Seaspiracy, faced some pushback for exaggerating claims in Cowspiracy, but it’s hard to ignore testimony from slaves. It’s safe to say this film is much, much more than a missed opportunity for a pun.

Watch Seaspiracy on Netflix