Very interesting – though several years old – article about food marketing in the realm of seafood. If you’re interested in how I linked to it, I was checking out the menu for a restaurant I’m visiting for a friend’s birthday tonight. The menu had Jonah Crab listed under the seafood section, and curious as to what that was, I linked through to a listing of popular restaurant and market seafoods. I noticed “peekytoe” crab listed, and remembered seeing it on menus (usually something a little precious and fancy, like an avocado terrine with roasted red pepper foam and peektoe crab mousse on top…).

Imagine my surprise when I found out that “peekytoe” crab is just regular old Maine crab (or rock crab) – the kind you can steam and eat out of their delicious red shells, or just fish over the wharf and catch a few at low tide with a piece of bait on a line. I remember catching them under rocks at low tide and once, when I was 9, creating an “aquarium” in old enamel basin. I added rocks, periwinkle snails, dog whelks, rock crabs, and seaweed. I supposed, as scavengers who would eat rotted herring, the rock crabs would eat the pink deli ham I put in the “aquarium”. Disappointingly, they never did and I returned them later to their rocky home off the breakwater out to to the Mussel Ridge channel marker. In any case, the article makes a key point in that renaming seafood to make what was once commonplace a palatable delicacy is certainly a dangerous move, as many consumers are unaware of the origins of their (potentially endangered) seafood meal. Calling things by cute names, or even using catchy of-the-moment descriptors, like sustainable, or local, are only useful if they serve a purpose beyond getting consumers to pay for, and digest, foods that are not already endangered, unhealthy, or unsustainable.