It looks as if Chesapeake blue crabs will be protected from their natural enemies this summer by their cost, as someone once said about lobster. But it's unclear whether that will be enough to help conserve one of this region's most valuable resources - leaving some consumers wondering whether they should be making an effort to eat less crab.
Because local cuisine is so heavily based on Chesapeake crab meat, Maryland restaurant owners and their customers would have a much tougher time with a boycott of crab than they did with swordfish a couple of years ago.
For a lot of Marylanders, summer is defined by crab feasts and crab-cake dinners. They can live with eating steamed crabs from Louisiana, and they are willing to make their crab cakes with jumbo lump meat imported from Southeast Asia. They may think the flavor of a Chesapeake Bay crab is superior, but who can really tell when it's steamed in Old Bay or gussied up with mayonnaise and Worcestershire?
The one thing Marylanders probably won't do is switch to, say, fried chicken in place of steamed crabs, no matter how expensive they get.
"I'm going to eat as much as I can because you never know," jokes Wayne Bridges, manager of the Crab Claw in St. Michaels, a favorite stop for tourists in the Eastern Shore town. Still, Bridges isn't convinced Maryland has a crab emergency.
"I know people say crabs are scarce, but it happens every year until the season gets going the first or second week in June," he says.
At least one local chef is willing to take a different view. "I'm all for a [boycott]," says Nancy Longo, chef-owner of Pierpoint restaurant in Fells Point. "I don't have to eat as many crabs this year if it means more next year."
It's not just here
Last year's crab harvest was the lowest since 1983, when the Maryland Department of Natural Resources started keeping detailed records. Scientists are predicting this year could be worse. Restaurants are still getting most of their hard crabs from points south (such as North Carolina, Texas and Louisiana), even though the local season started in April. But crabs from other states won't solve the problem. The decline is national.
A couple of weeks ago, Billy Martin of Martin Seafood Co. in Jessup was talking to a commercial crabber in North Carolina. The waterman had put out 600 pots and gotten 45 bushels when he might normally expect 200 or 300.
