Crayfish are ungrateful freshwater crustaceans that look like small lobsters but aren’t nearly as cool. Other names for these creeps include freshwater lobster, mountain lobster, mudbug, crawfish, and crawdad. Crawdad is the term I’m most familiar with, but I live in Alaska so what do I know.

Let me get my disclaimer out of the way before I proceed past this point. I don’t like seafood. I never have and I don’t know if I ever will. So the following opinions mean absolutely nothing, but I’m not sorry that I think crawfish are garbage.

They like to eat hotdogs and live in mud puddles. They’re pretty dumb. My animosity towards these animals stems from the fact that I got pinched by one when I was younger. It was totally my fault, but it didn’t need to pinch me. I wasn’t going to eat it. I don’t like sea food, or lake food or whatever they’re considered.

Wait, would lake trout meat be considered sea food even though they come from a lake? I’ve never thought about that before. What a confusing thing.

Anyway, this incident happened in Louisiana when I was about 8 years old. It was crossing the road in front of our house at the time when I walked up to it. I just wanted to pet it. I guess for some reason or another it felt the need to go into ultra jerk mode and it attacked me. I’m pretty sure it had a sword. Whatever. I’m not a fan of that place.

See, my step-brother and I would routinely tie a piece of hotdog to a string on a stick and go across the road and ‘fish’ for these little lobster impersonators.  They’re super greedy and once they pinched the hotdog they didn’t want to let it go.

But aside from all that, Crawdads can be found as pets and apparently they make good bait (yuck). I guess they’re good for attracting large and small mouth bass, trout, pike, and catfish (yuck) when stuck on a hook. Removing the claws from the crawfish prevents them from attacking would-be predators thinking about biting the hook as well. That’s pretty brutal if you ask me.

Crawfish are also considered edible, mainly in areas such as the whole world. Like other crustaceans, usually only the tail portion is eaten. But there’s these things called crawfish boils (I can’t even fathom what a nightmare that would be) where other parts of the crawfish are eaten, such as the claw meat.

If I had to take a guess, I would say that the idea of making crawfish boils a thing, was most likely born somewhere in the south. Sorry, no offense to anyone living there. But it just so happens that something like 95% of the crawfish harvested in the United States comes from Louisiana.

Crayfish are not Kosher and are often served in bisques, soups, and étouffées. They are not served in my house, unless of course Vanessa says they’re going to be; in which case, I will then proceed to the bedroom and shut the door behind me sort of aggressively while having my typical pout fest. The rest of the house will then begin to smell awful, like just disgusting, because of the icky aroma coming from the stupid yabbies.