U.S. Janet B. wrote in rec.food.cooking:

> 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/

Thanks! I knew nothing of this

--