On Crawfish

One of my finest memories of the brief time I spent traveling was Orthodox Easter on the Greek Island of Patmos. My traveling companion and I arrived fairly early in the afternoon, and were met at the ferry by the owner of a nice, cheap hotel. We rented rooms, and he dropped us off at one of the nicest places we would stay on the whole trip. (Go to Greece in April!) Shortly after we got settled, there was a knock at the door, and the hotel owner insisted that we join him for Easter dinner. Why the hell not?

The first stop was a local restaurant, which would probably be more memorable if it weren't for what followed. After a full and delicious meal at the restaurant, we hopped back in the truck, and zoomed into this neighborhood full of beautiful white homes. We stop at a large one of these homes, and pile into the backyard, where the owner, his wife and children, and other friends greet the hotel owner, and us, as if they had been awaiting our arrival. There was roasted lamb, to be eaten with the fingers, and homemade wine, and goat cheese. There were toasts, loud, boistrous, bilingual, there were compliments on my companion's and my beauty, and there was a feeling of welcome and joy that settled the general anxiety and uneasiness I had felt for most of the trip.

This was my first experience with true, uninhibited, unworried hospitality. I have always wanted my home to be like that one: relaxed, open, and bawdy. And that brings us to the topic, the crawfish boil. A totally informal way to have your friends stuff themselves and drink too much. The first time I ever ate crawfish was at college, during one of the festivals that happened during the spring. It was delicious (and I'm a head-sucker). I've loved crawfish ever since.

For those not in the know, a crawfish is a freshwater crustacean (there has been some debate over whether or not they are insects). It looks like a tiny lobster, and it lives in the mud. It is cooked in boiling water (more on that later) with spices and served on newspaper. The saying goes "Pinch the tail and suck the head," and this is a fairly accurate description of how to eat a crawfish.

Last May, John and I, and 3 other misplaced Southerners marooned in the slow to come Boston spring/summer, mail-ordered live crawfish and had a boil in the backyard of our little apartment in Cambridge. We were quite good at it, so we tried it again this weekend, only now, we're in MS, the crawfish were cheaper, and the Southerners who came were hardly misplaced. Despite the chill in the air due to the rain, we were happy, and hungry. When I heard one guest muse about how the party reminded him of college, I felt an odd sense of accomplishment. Here, gathered around an old table covered in newspaper in my garage, were 9 people who were mostly strangers, and yet, we gathered together eagerly, to share and to eat. To fellowship, if you will.

I did, I have to admit, have some qualms about the cooking method, particularly after I let one of the fellows crawl on my arm and thought he was quite charming. I suppose this is why our parents tell us not to play with our food. We may feel guilty about eating it and become vegan or something equally abhorrent. I asked John, feeling a bit ashamed to ask the question, whether or not it was ethical to boil crawfish alive, and he looked at me with the same look that he gives me when I suggest we get a puppy, a look that is fully of incredulity and concern for my sanity.

"Everything you eat has to die somehow," he replied with a shrug. I allowed that to satisfy me. And I reread a section of Julie and Julia about cooking lobsters:

I had read up on all sorts of methods for humanely euthanizing lobsters - sticking them in the freezer, placing them in ice water then bringing it up to a boil (which is supposed to fool them into not realizing they're boiling alive), slicing their spinal cords with a knife beforehand. But all these struck me as palliatives thought up more to save boilers from emotional anguish than boilees from physical. In the end I just dumped them out of the paper bad into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetables. And then freaked the fuck out.
The pot wasn't big enough. Though the lobsters didn't shriek in horror the second I dropped them in, their momentary stillness only drew out the excruciating moment. I was like that instant your car begins to skid out of control and before your eyes you see the burning car wreck that is your destiny.
...My final victim was another Chinatown denizen. He was spryer than his predecessors, flailing around in his bag for the entire subway ride. Because shivving a dead lobster in the back would be no challenge at all.
I put him in the freezer for a while when I got home, to try to numb him, maybe make it go a little easier, but is there such a thing as an easy vivisection, really? After half an hour or so, while Eric retreated to the living room... I took the lobster out of the freezer and laid him out on the cutting board.
...The poor guy just sat there, waving his claws and antennae gently, while I stood over him, my lardgest knife poised at the juncture of chest and tail. I took a deep breath, let it out.
... I pressed down, making an incision in the shell where Julia said I could quickly sever the spinal cord.
The thing began to flail.
...Clear blood leaked off the edges of the cutting board onto the floor as the lobster continuned to flail vigorously, despite the fact that its head was now chopped neatly in two....I sawed away at the thing, managing to get about halfway through before I had to leave the room for a bit to clear my head.
But I think perhaps I'm approaching a Zenlike serenity when it comes to crustacean murder, because when I reenetered the kitchen to the sight of the giant thing pinned to the cutting board... I just giggled. (Pages 149-164, seriously reduced)

The fact of the matter is that most of us are going to eat lobster and crawfish anyway, and the least we can do is to make ourselves go through the possible psychic trauma of killing the creature ourselves. We are removed from the process of what makes our steak a steak, or our fish a fish. Cruelty is something to be avoided, but a fairly immediate death in a pot is merciful compared to being cut in half alive. I'm guessing. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan says this about a meal that he has hunted, gathered, and created from scratch, in a very literal sense: "The pleasures... are based on a nearly perfect knowledge" (410). And in some small way, this idea applies to the crawfish, and possibly, though I cannot speak for Julie Powell, the lobster: when we are fully aware of what we are doing to another creature, and why we are doing it, then perhaps our minds can more fully enjoy the product of what we have done.

So why did my husband and I boil 36 pounds of crawfish on Saturday? Perhaps this is circular, but, we did it for the pleasure we could take from it, and the pleasure we could give to others from it. Maybe pleasure should not be the standard by which we measure all of our ethical decisions. But, then, all of our ethical decisions were never measured by the same yardstick anyway. Pleasure should be a consideration when we eat, as well as ethics, sustainability, and nutrion. If we leave out one of these factors, then we can never really acheive what it was I felt in Greece. If we think of each of them, in careful consideration, and giving each its proper weight, we can enjoy ourselves and our company while we eat. And really, this is what a party should be.