Crawfish in Louisiana is about more than mere cravings. Our desire for them can be tied to cultural cues and these are hard-wired. We build traditions and rituals around crawfish in ways that are social and seasonal.
So what happens when the seasons don’t exactly cooperate? We’re learning in real time right now.
This year’s season is shaping up differently. That’s due to the drought that struck our region last year and is having a long reaching effect with higher prices, scarcer supply and smaller crawfish.
It's still early days for this crawfish season (it’s still February after all) but already we're seeing some strange wrinkles to the familiar patterns.
Crawfish pricing right now is about as consistent as your New Orleans water bill, some ardent crawfish lovers are abstaining altogether until the situation changes and I’ve even seen previously boiled frozen crawfish from prior seasons turning up, reheated for new life, or some semblance of it. I’ve tried it so you don’t have to. This is wooly stuff. My advice: just don’t.
The stakes are high. Many restaurants and plenty of seafood markets rely on crawfish season now the way bakeries do king cake. The seasonal surge underwrites a lot of the lean times around here. The last thing any business contending with higher costs needs right now is another hit.
But there’s hope ahead. There’s been a price drop in recent days that’s promising. If the weather in the harvest areas cooperates, there's hope things could continue to progress for bigger, less expensive crawfish to come.
Still, people do want their crawfish when they want it. It goes back to those rituals and traditions.
Crawfish, after all, is not just a meal. For some it’s a pursuit, a hobby. It takes skill. It requires gear. It has a season, and you look forward to that season all year. And for many that season starts with Lent, no matter if Lent begins in mid-February or early March.
But as anyone know who has ever stood with a timer over a pot of crawfish through the soaking phase, patience is a crawfish lover’s virtue.
