I grew up on the East Coast, so I grew up eating steamed crabs.\u00a0 Blue crabs in particular (which turn orange when steamed) are the best crabs there are\u2026but it can be difficult to convince foreigners of this fact.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult because foreigners aren\u2019t usually around long enough to learn how to eat them.\u00a0 A foreigner, should he or she consent to partake, needs a native to teach him how to do so.\u00a0 In theory, we natives took pride in dispensing those lessons.\u00a0 In actuality, we loathed the prospect of foreigners at the table.<\/p>\n
We dreaded the foreigner\u2019s presence because we knew that we would have to monitor his or her discard pile and point out all the wasted meat.\u00a0 Wasted meat was more than wasted money (though it was that, too); wasted meat at the crab table evidenced something more profoundly disrespectful.\u00a0 It\u2019s like some tourist overlooked a \u201cDo Not Trespass\u201d sign and trod right into the most sacred room in the most sacred temple.\u00a0 He or she did not understand where he or she was, we startled natives thought, and yet he felt absolutely free to proceed.\u00a0 Us natives, having warily agreed to his or her presence at the table, oscillated between trying to teach the basics of technique and sitting silently horrified.\u00a0 Fortunately, the foreigner got bored with the whole thing after a few half-eaten crabs. At this point, his or her obliviousness was generally confirmed via some version of the comment:\u00a0 \u201cI liked the taste, but it was too much work for to little meat.\u201d<\/p>\n
We natives bristled to hear this comment because we natives understood that the work (and the time that the work required) was not a detriment to that deliciousness\u2026it was that which produced a full resounding of the deliciousness.\u00a0 We natives sat down to crabs, you see, for hours.\u00a0 We sat down happily, knives in hands, to work.\u00a0 It was unusual to be giddy about the prospect of going to work, but that\u2019s exactly what we were.\u00a0 We loved our work; we had great respect for the technique, met continuously by deliciousness, becoming indistinguishable from deliciousness.\u00a0 To understand work and pleasure to be bound up together in this way, to understand that the most delicious of all deliciousness was a kind of dwelling, a kind of learned savoring of time, changes a person.\u00a0 We became more than just hungry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up on the East Coast, so I grew up eating steamed crabs.\u00a0 Blue crabs in particular (which turn orange when steamed) are the best crabs there are\u2026but it can be difficult to convince foreigners of this fact.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult because foreigners aren\u2019t usually around long enough to learn how to eat them.\u00a0 A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n