Crab

Don't let it be said that Baltimore isn't at the forefront of the environmental protection movement.  According to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," Charm City is almost single-handedly helping to save a certain species from extinction.  Unfortunately, it isn't the polar bear. It's the, ahem, crab. And, no, not that crab.         Thanks to Brazilian waxes and similar trends, the ecosystem of pubic lice is endangered, the show's Jessica Williams reports.

Perhaps no other Maryland business is as dependent on seasonal guest workers as the crab processing industry. Hundreds of people come into the country each year, most from Mexico, to pick crabmeat from the shell at fewer than two dozen plants scattered around the Chesapeake Bay. This dependency on the H-2B visa program has always been controversial. And crab processors found themselves back in the spotlight last week after the release of a report alleging guest workers have been ill-treated with incidents of harassment, low wages, and substandard housing.

Spike Gjerde, executive chef and co-owner of Woodberry Kitchen, shows America how to make a soft-shell crab sandwich. He also tells America that no one in Baltimore refers to it as a soft-shell crab sandwich. Apparently, we all say "soft-crab sandwich. " I don't know about that. But I do know that Woodberry Kitchen 's soft-shell crab sandwich uses white bread, so it's automatically great. Spike's recipe for soft-shell crabs appears in the May issue of Esquire magazine, as part of its "Eat Like a Man" series.

MIAMI -- Big government is making a new attempt to impose itself as Big Brother or, in the case of a local restaurant, Big Sister.The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was informed that Joe's Stone Crab restaurant, an 84-year-old family-owned Miami institution with 250 employees, had not hired any female ''waitpersons'' in four years.Without a formal complaint by any individual alleging discrimination, the EEOC used Census data to persuade U.S. District Judge Court Daniel Hurley that a state of discrimination against women exists at Joe's.

Blaine Young isn't exactly a household name in Maryland, but the prospective contender for the Republican GOP nomination has to be a bit better known in political circles after the splash he made at the annual political rite of passage known as the J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clam Bake in Crisfield Wednesday. Young, president of the Frederick County Board of County Commissioners, brought a busload of supporters to the Eastern Shore fishing port to promote his increasingly credible candidacy.

Jack Brooks and other leaders of Maryland's seafood industry have faced the same problem for more than a decade: a shortage of seasonal foreign workers to pick out the morsels of crab meat that wind up on dinner plates across the country. But this summer, Brooks and the operators of other Eastern Shore picking houses are dealing with an entirely different challenge. Brooks has plenty of workers, but he's not sure whether he'll be able to afford to keep them. Seafood processors along the East Coast are steamed about a new Labor Department requirement that would force businesses that use foreign workers to increase their wages by as much as 50 percent.

For millions of years, crabs have been scuttling about the bottom of the world's oceans and bays, but few regions have embraced the mean-spirited, omnivorous crustacean with as much vigor as we have here in Maryland. When I moved here from the Midwest and soon after attended my first crab feast, I remember thinking, "What is wrong with these people?" Sitting in the hot sun for hours at a clip, smashing steamed crustaceans with a mallet and then sorting through razor-sharp bits of shell and crab entrails for a thimbleful of meat seemed more like some sort of torture than a good time.

Bottom of the Bay, the venerable (since 1972) crab joint-cum-seafood restaurant on Route 1 in Laurel, is not easy to describe. It's a one-story, two-room structure that defines what Maine lobster purveyors up "nawth" call "eating in the ruff. " That is, shoes and shirts are required (we think), but that's about it. Boasting about 60 seats, according to manager John Knapp, the main dining room and the bar are roughly equal in size. If you're seeking intimacy, forget it. Individual tables are set up on two sides, against the walls.

YOU NEVER FORGET your first crab fluff. Mine came, like a balloon in the Macy's parade, out of the kitchen at Bud's Crab House in Highlandtown in 1976. (I guess this is the silver anniversary of my first crab fluff.) It looked like a swollen, brown softball with claws and legs. You could start a pretty good argument over how to make a crab fluff, but, from what I remember, Bud's short-order cook stuffed a soft-shell crab with crabmeat, dipped the whole thing in some kind of thick batter and launched the concoction into a deep fryer.

For years, environmentalists and watermen have been searching for a way to deal with the Chesapeake Bay's "ghost pots" - derelict crab traps that are too deep to retrieve and too problematic to co-exist with marine life. Though the traps have been abandoned, they continue to ensnare and kill crabs. Now two Anne Arundel County high school seniors have developed a possible solution: a trap held together with zinc rings that decay, making abandoned traps fall apart at the bottom of the bay. "Leave it kids to find a great solution for a serious problem," said Tony Friedrich, executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland.