Reporter from Outside magazine travels around south Louisiana to see what the post-BP gumbo tastes like. He stops to talk to Dean Blanchard, a shrimp broker on Grand Isle:

“How are your shrimp?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t eat dat shit,” he said, rubbing his spiky gray hair.

“Really?”

“Dat water’s poison. Every day, dey haulin’ dead porpoises in front of my place. Wildlife says dey was dying before the oil spill. I say, Yeah? I musta been sleepin’. Cause I ain’t never seen y’all haul one in front of my place before. Now I see y’all haul a hundred of these motherfu*kers!”

It should be noted that Dean is one of the claimants in the class action angling for a massive settlement with BP. He therefore may not be the most objective source. But his story more or less checks out. NOAA reported some 80 abnormal dolphin deaths between January and April 2010. Since the spill, more than 450 dead dolphins have washed up on Gulf Coast beaches. Many were newborns or stillborns, leading some biologists to hypothesize that ingested oil had contributed to a wave of miscarriages. NOAA has declared the situation an “unusual mortality event.”

If none of the seafood tested by NOAA showed oil contamination, how could the Gulf’s marine life be so affected? A recent paper by LSU biologist Andrew Whitehead provides a clue. Whitehead examined Gulf killifish—minnows that live in the marshes and are an important food source for many species—before, during, and after the oil hit. He found that even tiny amounts of oil caused genetic abnormalities and tissue damage in the fish, enough to impair their reproductive abilities. And you wouldn’t have known this simply by testing them for contamination.

“Though the fish may be safe to eat,” Whitehead said, summarizing the report, “that doesn’t mean they are capable of reproducing normally.” This problem may extend to other marine life. And many fishermen blame low yields on BP’s dispersants, though the scientific jury is still out.

“The dispersant is biodegradable,” said Ralph Portier, professor of environmental science and oceanography at LSU. “The oil is biodegradable. So we’re not worried about their presence over a long period. The real issue is whether the mixture of dispersant  and oil made it to the marsh and had a catastrophic effect on key organisms. There are literally hundreds of scientists working on these problems, but right now there are too many variables and not enough data.”

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Perched on his dock at the very edge of the Gulf, Blanchard has a unique vantage point to speculate on such things. And what he wanted to tell me was that the white shrimp season was a bust. “White shrimp are born on the beach,” he said. “Dey ain’t got a chance to go nowhere. Dey layin’ in polluted fu*kin’ water. Dey dead! Unless dey like Jesus and can raise from the dead, dey ain’t comin’ back. Usually, I buy about 250,000 pounds opening day. This year I didn’t buy one. First time in my life.”

Again, Blanchard’s not lying. According to Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, the white shrimp haul was down 80 percent across Louisiana in 2011. On November 30, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the poor season, Feinberg, the claims czar, announced that commercial crab and shrimp harvesters would be entitled to four times their documented 2010 losses, instead of two times, in exchange for waiving their right to sue. This was good news for the 1,000 or so shrimpers and crabbers still holding out but an affront to the 4,000 who had already accepted a settlement and were told that there would be no retroactive payments.

I asked Blanchard whom he blamed for the disaster. “The French media came and asked me whose fault it was. I told ’em Napoleon. He should’ve killed all the British at Waterloo. The German media came. I told ’em Hitler. He should’ve bombed ’em with the fu*kin’ Luftwaffe. The American media came. I told ’em it was George Washington’s fu*kin’ fault. We been fightin’ the British on this island since 1673.”

Having read that, I’m still going to Hot Tails for a shrimp poboy today. Sadly, the shrimp will probably be from China.