Blue Crab

The routine isn't rehearsed, but after hundreds of appearances on the QVC shopping channel over the past decade, Ron and Margie Kauffman know what they'll say when it comes to the millions of Maryland-style crab cakes they sell under the brand Chesapeake Bay Gourmet. There is plenty of talk about the large lumps of crabmeat, about the company's ties to Maryland and the Chesapeake. On QVC's Web site, the products are labeled "Made in USA." What the carefully worded language omits is one critical fact.

By 9 a.m. the crab boats have already been coming and going from the pier for close to five hours, with migrant Burmese workers laboring to unload, sort, weigh and steam crabs that are destined for dinner plates on the other side of the world. Presiding over this assembly line are Nantanee and Somsak Choeyklin, who remember when this crustacean that made them rich was only junk and they were poor. The blue swimming crab, known in Thailand as "horse crab," mottled and bluish-green, was little more than subsistence food when their parents were fishermen.

The stained glass blue crab formerly at Baltimore-Washington International Airport certainly evokes Callinectes sapidus, the "beautiful swimmer" of Chesapeake Bay, but its survival skills more resemble a cat's. The 400-pound, 5-foot sculpture, now crated in a Millersville warehouse, is due to return to the airport for its next life after a new $264 million terminal opens May 18. Exactly when and where remains to be determined until officials see "how the new building operates," BWI spokesman Jonathan O. Dean said.

Juvenile blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay have reached their highest levels since 1997, according to a new survey, and state officials foresee a potentially bountiful crab season. The 2004-2005 winter dredge survey, conducted by researchers with Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, sampled crabs at 1,500 sites in the bay from December through March. During those months, crabs burrow in mud, making it easy for scientists to count them and estimate their numbers baywide.

And you thought the A-B-Cs were simple. So, at first, did the author and illustrator of B is for Blue Crab (Sleeping Bear Press, $17.95), the new Maryland alphabet book for children. But when it came to representing the state in letters, the process evoked surprising passions. "Everywhere we went ... when I would say I'm working on an alphabet book for Maryland, they would say, `What's `A'?" said Laura Stutzman, the book's illustrator. "It got to be hysterical how people could not resist guessing what the letters were."

HEALTH authorities tell us to eat more fish, an excellent source of lean protein and heart-healthy Omega-3 oils. Meanwhile, fish make the news in contrary ways: toxic mercury in tuna, PCBs in farmed salmon, U.S.-banned antibiotics in imported shrimp, Maryland's new limits on eating Chesapeake Bay rockfish. Add to these concerns worries about overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction from the way some species are caught or farmed. So, what's left that's guaranteed safe and also environmentally responsible?

A COUPLE OF years ago in this space, I jumped on the Motor Vehicle Administration when it came out with that hideous farm-theme license plate. Basically, I had two major problems with the farm plates. No. 1, the color scheme didn't make me think of Maryland at all. It was this Southwestern-y blending of burnt red, burnt orange and burnt yellow, and if it made you think of anything at all, it was of having a chalupa at Taco Bell. And No. 2, that whole business with the barn and the cow and the fence - not to mention the slogan "Our Farms, Our Future" - didn't evoke the Free State, either.

Pollution and bad weather forced so many Maryland watermen to stop crabbing this past summer that the state's Chesapeake Bay blue crab harvest will be the worst in 25 years, fishery managers say. The 2003 season, which ended Monday, is expected to produce a harvest of about 18 million pounds from the bay's Maryland waters, according to the Department of Natural Resources. That's a sharp drop from last year, when crabbers brought in about 24 million pounds. It is the lowest crab harvest since 1978, when the catch was 17 million pounds.

The Chesapeake Bay's blue crab population has apparently stabilized but at such a historically low number that Maryland and Virginia must keep up efforts to limit the annual harvest, according to a study scheduled to be delivered today. The report, from some of the bay's leading crab scientists, warns that "our work to restore the blue crab is far from over" and that pressures to harvest more crabs "risk driving the stock down further, to dangerously low levels." "There is still ongoing reason to be concerned," said Thomas J. Miller, a fisheries ecologist at the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory and member of the study group "We've got to maintain what I think have been some prudent measures."

CRISFIELD - In an era when crabbers struggle to make a living from the Chesapeake Bay, when the crab meat in supermarkets may come from the Far East and whole crabs from down South, it was perhaps fitting that the winner of the Crab Cooking Contest here came from across Maryland's northern border. Marrita Blatchley, a retiree and active volunteer from Shrewsbury, Pa., applied her love of cooking and good food to Maryland blue crab and came up with a winner. Her Crab-and-Corn Pudding With Sweet Red-Pepper Cream was novel enough and tasty enough to earn her first place among main dishes and grand prize in the cook-off, which drew 18 cooks to the classroom stoves at Woodson Middle School in Crisfield during the Labor Day weekend.