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Alabama is being invaded. Hard-shelled, 10-legged invaders from the north are popping up all over the state and being offered as surprisingly decent fast-casual seafood in places thousands of miles removed from snow or crabs or even coastline.
Alabama is being taken over by crabs. Or at least by crab shacks.
Don’t believe me? Check out the Crab Barrack in Birmingham. Or Anniston. Or go visit The Juicy Crab in Tuscaloosa or Montgomery, or the locations coming soon to Hoover, Dothan, and Mobile.
Keep in mind The Juicy Crab is different from The Juicy Seafood, which has a similar logo, menu and decor at its 11 locations across Alabama, from Muscle Shoals to Gadsden, Opelika to Huntsville, Auburn and Dothan.
You can tell the difference because the Juicy Crab logo shows a red crab, claws up, holding a sign that says “The Juicy Crab,” while The Juicy Seafood features a red crab holding a crab fork, with the restaurant’s name printed across its shell. Totally different.
There’s also the brand new Krab Kingz Seafood in Prattville, the Cajun Crab in Montgomery, T-Town Crab in Tuscaloosa and, well, you get the idea.
But wherever in Alabama you go to get snow or king crab, know your seafood traveled much farther than you did to get to that table.
Take my crabs, please
Alabama can produce bushels of its own fish, shrimp and blue crabs from Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, but the crabs that are suddenly taking over the state definitely aren’t from around here.
Those who catch, sell and promote Alabama seafood have mixed reactions to the emerging trend. On the one hand, building interest in seafood isn’t a bad thing, and many of these new restaurants also serve blue crab, oysters, shrimp or other seafood that can be caught in Alabama waters.
But the stars of the show, the big red crabs from the logos and the t-shirts and the plastic bibs they give you with every order, are invaders.
“I can’t say it’s good or bad, we just wish they would serve Alabama Gulf seafood, and would hope that they would look into that,” said Tommy Cauthen, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
Cauthen also works with the Alabama Seafood Marketing Commission. That’s a cooperative group that includes the state Department of Conservation, as well as fishermen, seafood processers, restaurants and others to promote Alabama Gulf Seafood.
Cauthen said the seafood commission provides its well-advertised Alabama Gulf Seafood logo to restaurants and markets that sell Alabama-caught seafood. That lets the public know they’re getting a home-grown product.
The commission also keeps a list of Alabama seafood providers on its website that people can search to find good, local options.
Restaurants and seafood suppliers in Alabama are required to disclose where seafood comes from when they sell it, thanks to a 2010 law enacted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
“They don’t have to post it, where it came from, but they do have to tell you if you ask,” Cauthen said.
So, we decided to ask. AL.com visited two of these new seafood joints in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, to see where the seafood came from, how good it was, and if there was any difference between the new, competing crab palaces.
Here’s what we found:
Digging in
For this adventure, AL.com visited The Crab Barrack in Birmingham and the Juicy Crab in Tuscaloosa, though there were dozens of others to choose from.
The restaurants were similar, not like McDonald’s and Burger King are similar, but more like McDonald’s and McDowell’s from the Coming to America movies, or the “spot the difference” photo games where the photo is the same except the man’s watch is on the other wrist, or his shirt pocket has suddenly disappeared.
The menus are almost identical. Appetizers, side orders, a “Get Your Hands Dirty” section for the seafood boils, then the fried seafood baskets, then the combos. The seasonings options are even the same: Cajun, garlic butter (seasoning), lemon pepper, garlic butter (only), or the special, which is a blend of all the others.
The seafood boils, were listed on the menu under the get your hands dirty section and didn’t disappoint in that regard. Both restaurants provided plastic bibs with their logo, as well as disposable gloves and they were needed. The boils also come with a metal bucket for discarded crab bits and both had butcher paper table cloths where the servers wrote their names and your order in permanent marker.
The seafood came out tied up in plastic bags, filled full of seasoned juices, crab legs, potatoes and corn.
We ordered king crab legs in Birmingham and Dungeness crab in Tuscaloosa. The Dungeness was served with only a plastic fork to get the meat out, while the king crab at the Crab Barrack came with claw crackers and crab scissors that could be used to cut neatly across the shells.
The Dungeness crab was pretty good and the king crab was very good, though it cost about $40 for a pound. Dungeness and snow crabs were available in half- or full-pound portions ranging from $14-30.
The king crab was trickier to eat, with spines on the shell that stabbed you back, but the reward was worth it with larger chunks of better-tasting meat.
Dungeness crabs come from the Pacific waters of Washington State, Oregon, northern California, Alaska and Canada.
Snow crab and king crab are found in the deep, cold depths of the Arctic, on the Atlantic and Pacific side. In best case scenarios, that means they come from Alaska or Canada. It could also mean the crabs came from Russia and may or may not have stopped at a processing facility in China along the way.
AL.com asked the servers in both restaurants where the crabs had come from, and after checking with the manager, both answered.
The Crab Barrack said it was serving Canadian crab. The server at The Juicy Crab said they had Alaska crabs that particular day, but that the restaurant does sometimes serve crab from Russia, when the domestic crabs were harder to get.
A long, strange trip
Many of those crabs crossed the Pacific Ocean to get to your plate, and some of them may have done it twice. Labeling on seafood packaging is supposed to tell you what you’re eating and where it came from, but sometimes it doesn’t tell the whole story.
“You might see on a product, ‘wild caught Alaska salmon from China,’” said Ryan Bigelow, senior program manager of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which advocates for sustainable seafood around the world.
Bigelow said that practice was perfectly legitimate but can be confusing to people who don’t know much about the global seafood industry.
“When you label seafood, you can mark where it was caught or, if it was processed, where it was processed,” Bigelow said. “So oftentimes a piece of salmon will be caught in Alaska, flash frozen, which is not a bad thing. Flash freezing is actually very, very good for fish quality. But flash frozen, sent to China to have the fin bones picked out, refrozen and sent back.”
There are also issues with fraud and mis-labeling, as well as countries who simply don’t follow international law and accords. A March 15 report by the Guardian highlighted e-DNA analysis showing that nearly 40% of 9,000 samples taken from restaurants, markets and fishmongers were not actually the species they were supposed to be.
And Chinese fishing boats have been accused of depleting fish stocks from Ghana to the Galapagos Islands in South America, overfishing waters thousands of miles from home and sending unmarked “ghost boats” to places where fishing is supposed to be prohibited.
Seafood Watch was created in 1999, spun off from an exhibit at the aquarium highlighting the impacts of over-fishing on wildlife populations. Since then, it’s grown to become one of the leading authorities on seafood sustainability.
The program encourages consumers to learn more about their seafood choices: What species is it really, where did it come from and how it was caught?
One way is to ask vendors or restaurants directly, and in some places, like Alabama, they are required to tell you. Another way is to shop at businesses that have made sustainability pledges and that provide information about their seafood up front.
The group publishes a web site and print guides with lists of recommendations for species that are a “best choice” for sustainability and which kinds conservation-minded consumers should avoid. They also publish a list of businesses that have made sustainability pledges regarding their seafood.
“One thing we found in extensive surveys of businesses is they truly believe that they’re moving towards sustainability because their customers want that,” Bigelow said.
Lots of crabs in the sea
At this juncture, populations of snow crab, Dungeness crab and king crab remain relatively stable, according to Bradley Stevens, a professor of Marine and Environmental Science at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
“I would say all these fisheries are fairly sustainable,” Stevens said.
There have been some shortages of snow crab legs in recent weeks. In Myrtle Beach, S.C. this month, restaurants scrambled to meet the demand for snow crab, and for those who can find them, prices have tripled according to Myrtle Beach Online. Some restaurants that previously offered all-you-can-eat crab legs had to switch to selling legs by the pound.
But those are more likely the result of hold-ups in the supply chain due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
King crabs may be another story.
Stevens has published scientific articles and book chapters on crab fisheries and previously worked on crab population surveys in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. He said climate change and warming Arctic waters may pose a bigger threat to the king crab populations than overfishing.
“The [king crab] fishery seems to be continually going downhill, and I think that’s another response to global warming,” Stevens said. “They traditionally thrived in much colder water and the waters of the Bering Sea have just been increasing in temperature over the past couple of decades, and the population of king crabs up there has continued to decline.”
That’s one reason king crab legs cost significantly more than other species. They’re also much larger than the other species, with legs reaching 18-20 inches in length.
Stevens said while all crabs have 10 legs, (they’re in the order decapoda, meaning ten-legged), the king crab only has eight visible legs. The back two are hidden and used only for reproduction, making them genetically closer to a hermit crab than the snow or Dungeness crabs, which are considered “true crabs” because they 10 visible legs.
Stevens said that while king crabs were not in immediate danger, he expects to see a decline ahead.
“And there’s not much we can do about it,” he said. “We can reduce our catch levels, and that will happen ultimately as that population ratchets down. But I don’t see it doing well in the next decade or two.”
Russian crab farming
The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch gives the green light on crabs caught in Alaska or Canada, but slaps the avoid label on snow crab from Russia, where it says “illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing is a critical problem.”
Bigelow said Russia provides almost no information on its seafood efforts.
“It’s impossible to know where that crab was caught, how it was caught, if there’s any management in place,” he said. “Russia doesn’t even acknowledge that they send any crab to the United States. They say it only goes to Korea and Japan, but that’s... questionable.”
Stevens concurred.
“We have no idea what Russia does,” he said.
A new player in the and king crab game is Norway, which didn’t have king crabs naturally, but has now seen an invasive population establish itself after escaping from a Russian crab farming effort, according to a report in the Guardian.
Stevens said managing king crab harvests in Norway is tricky because on one hand it’s a new, lucrative industry. On the other hand, the crabs have wiped out a lot of the native sea life.
“All the sea stars and snails and sea urchins that were living in those fjords have been completely eaten by the king crabs,” Stevens said.
He said Norwegian authorities have settled on different management techniques in different areas hoping to catch and eliminate all the invasive king crabs in western Norway to prevent them from spreading to new areas, while trying to maintain a stable population to feed the world’s increasing appetite.
With Alaskan fisheries keeping limits on king crab harvests to protect their populations, and more new seafood restaurants opening all the time, the stage is set for others to creep in.
Despite these concerns, Stevens said he would still recommend all three species for restaurant-goers in Alabama and elsewhere.
“I wouldn’t be concerned about sustainability,” he said. “I think those three species are relatively sustainably harvested. You could argue that Russia’s may not be, but on the other hand, we’re probably helping Norway by getting rid of their king crabs.”
Buy local
Globally, the seafood industry is beginning to show strain, especially with a number of popular species where demand is depleting wild populations.
“The amount of wild fish that we catch has pretty much leveled off and is in many cases dropping off a bit,” Bigelow said. “That’s despite the fact that we’re fishing more places, and harder than ever before. So we’re doing more work for less fish.”
It’s not a new concept. The Atlantic cod was popular staple of fish fillet sandwiches and fish and chips until populations crashed in the 1990s. The cod is bouncing back in some areas but remains a poster child for the dangers of overfishing.
In addition to overfishing, there are other concerns about buying seafood internationally, where there may be few laws in place to regulate the industry. U.S. Customs officials recently began stepping up efforts to crack down on seafood from Taiwan and other places where child labor or forced labor has been reported.
And just because you live near a source of seafood, like Mobile Bay or the Gulf of Mexico, that doesn’t mean the seafood you get there is local.
“I’m in Monterey, California, so we have a wharf, and it’s a tourist town,” Bigelow said. “People assume that because they’re close to the ocean that they’re getting local caught seafood and I don’t think that’s a fair assumption.”
At the Alabama coast, Cauthen encouraged people to ask where their meal came from.
“Farm to table is so popular,” said Cauthen, “well surf to table is what we’re selling, and it helps the communities down there that are built around seafood like Bayou La Batre and Mobile and Dauphin Island and places like that. You’re helping your neighbors.”
The Link Lonk
April 29, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Crabs fell on Alabama: The new seafood shacks taking over the state - AL.com
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