The war over imported farm-raised shrimp being sold in restaurants in South Carolina — whose rich coastal waters already are teeming with wild shrimp and local shrimpers who earn a living catching them — is heating up in U.S. District Court, where a new lawsuit takes aim at dozens of Charleston restaurants for “shrimp fraud.”
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Charleston, brought by the South Carolina Shrimpers Association, accuses 40 Charleston-area restaurants of breaking state and federal laws for advertising South Carolina seafood but serving foreign shrimp, which some consumers might find shocking on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
“We want to set a precedent across the state: if you violate the law and get caught there’s consequences,” Gedney Howe IV, an attorney representing the shrimpers, told the Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet…