Slurp, Slurp, Slurp

Now that that teeny oil leak in the gulf is juuuuust about buggered up, its time to get down to the serious question: When do we start eating the shrimp and oysters again? Well, if you must wonder, the answer is "now"! Wait, you don't want to eat this seafood fresh from the Gulf Coast? You're worried about ingesting crude oil components or a toxic, proprietary chemical dispersant formulated by BP? Fuck you, you elitist snob! Didn't you hear that Gulf Coast seafood was entirely safe to eat?!? That's because the MARKETING CAMPAIGN hasn't started yet!

The FDA is taking a double faceted approach to ensure that Gulf seafood is back on the marketplace faster than you can say "Rubber Stamp Approval": some dude will smell it, aaand a laboratory will say it's OK:

Any fishing area affected by oil was closed to commercial fishing as a precautionary measure. In order to reopen an area to fishing, as was done a week ago with finfish and shrimp in state waters east of the Mississippi River, states must comply with FDA and NOAA reopening protocols requiring that seafood samples from each fishery be both smell tested by professional NOAA testers and chemically tested in one of the FDA's labs.

The area has to be designated as free of heavy oil by federal and state agencies before testing can begin. So far, none of the thousands of samples done by NOAA and the FDA has come back negative for the presence of oil or dispersants.

Nothing has come back negative for the presence of oil or dispersants? That sounds fantastic. We're sure that the dead animals washing ashore are doing so because they are so oil-free and plentiful. If this doesn't convince you that the seafood is OK, we don't know what would. We're absolutely sure that the dude that smells stuff is completely legit, and that ASTM quality laboratory protocols has already been developed to detect the effects of an unprecedented event that happened a couple of months ago. Yeah.

So now that Gulf seafood has been completely proven, without a doubt, to be safe, the only step left is to convince you to eat this oyster. Seriously, we'll pay you like 5 dollars to eat it.