notbob wrote in rec.food.cooking:

> On 2017-11-10, cshenk > wrote:
>
> > I've lived a few places where crawfish/crawdads were common. Here
> > isnt one of them and where you are probably isnt either.
>
> Yep. Not a lotta crawdads at this elevation.
>
> What was really strange, was when I still lived in CA. The CA Delta
> has millions of crawdads, but they're all saturated with mercury from
> the CA Goldrush era. Hence, we seldom eat 'em.
>
> One of the biggest crawdad festivals, on the West Coast, is out on the
> CA Delta in the small town of Isleton:
>
> http://www.isletoncoc.org/crawdad.html
>
> Those crawdads are all "imported" from Louisiana. We can even
> occassionally get crawdad and conch meat, here, on sale at our local
> beef butcher at a decent price. (the beef prices, here, are
> absurd)
>
> nb

Wow, I'd not have thought of the goldrush causing mercury issues!

They seem to have some version of 'crawdad' one amost every continent
but they can be related species and the ones in Japan were not very
good tasting to me. They look sort of like armored millipedes ;-)

Carol

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