On Fri, 10 Nov 2017 12:15:51 -0600, "cshenk" > wrote:

>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

history
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3014/