Thursday, 26 December 2013

Red Lobster's Future Is Uncertain; Here Are 17 Copycat Recipes To Make It OK

The dying seafood chain is being abandoned by its parent company. Time to drown your sorrows in homemade Cheddar Bay Biscuits and move on to ethically raised seafood.

Red Lobster isn't making money and its parent company, Darden, (which also owns Olive Garden and other chains), all but rang a death knell when it announced today that it would either spinoff or sell the seafood chain. While no Red Lobster locations are disappearing for now, this is bad news for the chain.

But in a way, good riddance: When BuzzFeed reached out to Darden about the source of Red Lobster and Olive Gardens' seafood a two months ago for a separate article, the spokesperson refused to give us any information at all about where the chains' food comes from. Given that seafood producers in China and Thailand are known to feed their shrimp untreated animal feces, and those countries supply nearly half of America's seafood, most of which is never inspected, Darden's lack of transparency is outdated and unacceptable. (Remember that Portlandia sketch about ordering happy, local chicken? It might beat being refused any information about the shrimp you're eating when you ask the company directly.)

So here's the plan: If Red Lobster disappears, it's mostly* OK, because you are going to make your favorite dishes yourself because it's easy and you're going to use seafood that didn't maybe eat poop when it was alive.

*Except that people might lose their jobs and this sucks.