Seafood Psychodelicide

Meet Shannon. Shannon is a Singaporean libertarian who runs a quasi-legal fish farm out of his house. Shannon absolutely rocks. Welcome to a very strange night that ended with me carrying a massive coffin full of fresh seafood into my dorm’s lounge.

I should probably start from the beginning. In the elevators of my dorm are a rotating cast of posters plugging various events, organizations, and general goings-on here at Yale-NUS College.

This one in particular caught my eye. Not only do I enjoy seafood, but I’m aware of the sustainability issue. Suffice to say our oceans are so overfished that unless something drastic changes, I’ll be telling my grandkids about when I was a little boy, how I used to eat the creatures that came out of the ocean (at this point ocean levels have risen to the point where Disney World has become the real-life Atlantis, and also the ocean temperatures has risen so significantly that there is no aquatic life left to speak of). Not to be so morbid, but the Chesapeake Bay is so overfished that crab is often listed at market price, and I can’t imagine the situation will improve at all. So what’s the solution? Well, thanks to this nifty little economic system that is based on unlimited growth in a world with finite resources, farming seafood is probably going to become more of a necessity.

Yes, it has become a bit of a meme online, but there’s no doubt that farmed seafood will become more and more commonplace as time progresses. If anyone wants to be my angel investor for an indoor shrimp farming venture, comment down below.

The fateful day arrived: me and about 15 other students piled into a bus and headed for the other side of Singapore. The event was organized by a classmate of mine, who briefed me on Shannon before we arrived at his house, but nothing truly could have prepared me for what I was about to lay my eyes on.

The photos absolutely do not do it justice but Shannon (foreground with the fish food) has essentially dug a massive pit where his front yard used to be and created a pool for fish and turtles. This type of DIY-marine life reminded me of a guy on TikTok who dug an eel pit in his basement, and I was flummoxed. Shannon explained that his farm produces around 2 tons of fish annually, and he built it right before the pandemic. Most of the fish he farms gets donated to charity, some of it gets released to the wild, and some gets sold in seafood subscription boxes (I bet you were all thinking of getting me one as a Hanukkah gift, but unfortunately Shannon doesn’t ship to the US). After getting to feed the fish and turtles, Shannon took us inside, where my mind continued to be blown.

What you thought was a long coffee table is actually a “fish hospital” containing baby giant grouper. Giant grouper, when full-grown, are absolute behemoths that can measure six feet long and weigh upwards of 500 lbs. Their natural habitat in Singapore has been threatened by human activity, and they are now practically extinct. When I asked what he uses them for, Shannon says that they make great pets before they get too big and get released to the ocean: my mind instantly flashed to the Dr. Suess book about the boy who overfed his pet fish Otto. Apparently there are some restaurants that specialize in giant grouper, and one fish can last for weeks.

There was also a huge tank full of shrimp. Check out how giant that shrimp in the top right is: for scale, that’s a tiger prawn next to it, a big shrimp in its own right.

Shannon’s house was absolutely a fever dream. It seemed to be more of a workshop with power tools scattered indiscriminately and fish tanks everywhere you turned.

He also has ducks and quail in his backyard, because at this point, why not?

Shannon also gave us a tutorial on how to butcher tuna. I got to try my hand, and it’s harder than it looks. Suffice to say that it is a very slippery affair, but now I technically know how to do it. I think it’s a good life skill to have. We dined on shrimp and tuna, both raw and gently torched. Because of sustainability, all of the shrimp shells and fish guts get thrown into the front-yard fish tank. The cycle of life.

After it got late enough, we moved to a whole-sale fruit and vegetable market. It was a very interesting scene, where about 75% of the workers are shirtless Chinese dudes with tattoo sleeves chain-smoking cigarettes. According to Shannon, this market used to be the site of some gang disputes, which perhaps explained the surprising number of luxury cars that were parked here.

If you’ve ever visited a wholesale fish market, you’ll know that you have to go in the wee hours of the morning to get the best products (shout-out Tsukiji fish market). We arrived at the Senoko Fishery Port at about 1 A.M., and split up into two groups so that we didn’t look like a tour group. Given that it is a port, they have a strong eye on immigration (curbing the illegal variety) and I had to trade in my passport for a temporary badge. There were also many signs forbidding pictures, so I had to take mine on the down-low. Apparently, the questionable immigration status of many of the fish market workers combined with the sometimes-illegal catch for sale (like hammerhead sharks) makes photos altogether discouraged. Nonetheless, I snuck a few.

While I didn’t see any hammerhead sharks, I did see some regular sharks as well as stingrays and all kinds of other shrimp and shellfish. We stocked up on crab, fish, and crawfish and decided to call it a night around 3 A.M.

The following evening in the dorm, Shannon joined us for a seafood feast. I must have eaten five of these flower crabs. Get this: it was only $35 USD for 22 pounds of fresh crab! Insane. My fingers still smell faintly of crab. If you’ve ever had soft-shelled crab, you’ve had a recently-molted flower crab.

That was my adventure last weekend. It was quite the experience, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that I have just one more week of classes, and only two weeks until I head back to Portland for winter break. My time here feels like its flown by, but it seems so familiar now. While I am excited to go home and be pampered for six weeks or so, I know in a few weeks’ time I’ll be itching to come back to Singapore, and I’m so glad I have another semester here to look forward to. But before I come back to Singapore for the spring semester, I have the great fortune of going to Seoul in January to visit my friend Henry, who’s studying at Yonsei University. In all my traveling I have never been to Korea, and I’m psyched to have someone show me around. There will most certainly be a blog for that trip.

So this is me signing off from Singapore. Given that finals are breathing down my neck, you probably won’t here from me again until after I leave. But once I get home, I’m planning on driving down to Salem to visit In-N-Out Burger. Not sure if that’s blog worthy, we’ll see.

Peace and Love,

Zev