Elizabeth (Lizzie) Grobbel looks at a couple hundred crustaceans swimming in a ramshackle Detroit house and sees what might one day be a sustainable, local aquaculture that ends up in skillets or on grills throughout the city, Robin Erb writes in a Free Press profile.
Grobbel, 23, greets the tiny creatures darting and jumping in nine tanks of saltwater. Net in hand, she crouched in the semi-darkness of the basement, peering through greenish liquid.
A master’s student of environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, Grobbel had been asked to continue research assessing the sustainability of domestic shrimp farming. She wanted to make it useful to a city with an overwhelming load of vacant homes and a lack of year-round, nutritious, locally grown food.
So she’s trying to grow shrimp — to see how difficult it is and to map out a plan for others.
That’s the challenge for the Graham Sustainability Institute at U-M — moving knowledge that’s usually locked up in labs and academic literature to the outside world.