I may never understand why the prawns are locked up in my supermarket

Perhaps its something to do with the US ‘food insecurity’ problem or maybe there are some arch-criminals with a penchant for shellfish, but I can’t work out why the prawns are padlocked, writes Holly Baxter

Is there some kind of Brooklyn shrimp mafia? (Getty/iStock)

Every Monday, I make a meal plan for the week ahead, which consists of the only five meals I can actually cook (weekends are for takeaways, because I have to have some joy in my life). Every Monday, I fill out the meal plan with a list of ingredients I need from my local grocery store in Brooklyn. Every Monday, I enter the store and go in search of  frozen prawns (or, as we say in the good ole US of A, shrimp). And every Monday, I find, to my continued horror, that the freezer containing the shrimp is wrapped twice round with a metal bar and padlocked.

“Why is the shrimp padlocked?” you, a perfectly reasonable bystander, might ask. And the truth is: I have no idea. Nothing else in the frozen fish aisle is padlocked. Beside the shrimp freezer are stacks of frozen cod, haddock, mussels, scampi, pre-prepared fishcakes, all ready for the taking. Indeed, nothing else in the entire store is padlocked. Not the electronics, not the cosmetics, not the large and tempting Oreo cakes, not the mega-sized bags of candy or the razors or the painkillers or the spiralised vegetables. Even more perplexingly, if you want to get a hold of the shrimp, you can – but first you have to describe the exact kind you want to a man behind the fish counter, who will then open up the padlocked freezer for 10 seconds only as you grasp the bag you said you needed and then sheepishly back away like an old man with a foot fetish in an adult bookstore.

Bagging groceries is seen as the domain of teens in need of weekend jobs and grandmothers in need of medical treatment; rarely will you see anyone in between