“Is nothing natural anymore?” was the thought that crossed my mind when I was browsing through the papers this morning. I say browsing because I never finished the article although I believe I read enough of it to be able to pull off this post.
Malaysians generally like food, and I think we are very fortunate that we have the climate to suit the production of quite a number of food types that the rest of the world regard as exotic, especially fruits. And then we’ve also got various ecologies that serve up a multitude of interesting food. One such thing is the mangrove crab Scylla seratta.
What got my goat (so to speak) was that the article mentioned about crab farming. The hard shelled brown crabs from the backwaters of the mangroves are now going to live in the luxurious world of artificial farms where their moving space will be within a small pot situated in a 2.5ft x 12 ft rectangular container and heaven only knows if their offspring (if they’re allowed to have any) will know a mangrove swamp if they saw it!
According to the article, crabs are farmed because the conditions of the mangrove are not always stable, i.e the salinity in the mangrove changes with the surrounding weather conditions such as storms, and a better solution would be stabilize everything by rearing them under controlled conditions in farms.
Now, I’m not against farming totally, as people do need to make a living and it does provide economic benefits and employment opportunities, but I have a feeling that by this artificial way of doing things, the crabs are not going to taste like crabs anymore due to the environment they’re raised in. Besides, what kind of a life is that, living in a small box, being fed cut up pieces of fish daily without having interesting conversations with fellow crabs on the changes of weather and economic conditions?
And then there’s the fact that people who earn a living by catching the crabs from the mangrove itself are going to lose their source of income because who cares if you were bitten by mosquitoes and had your calves scratched by stubborn mangrove barks while you were questing for the elusive crabs in this highly competitive world?
And on the flip side, we're actually saving the actual mangrove version from being hunted down to extinction with these farms. That's a good sign, right?
Personally, I’ve only eaten this type of crab about 5 to 6 times my entire life. The last would have been somewhere around two months ago when we brought some foreign visitors out to dinner. I wonder if the crabs we ate lived their lives to the fullest before meeting their miserable end in the cooking pot. I might skip on this the next time I eat out.
Not that I've got that out of the way... the farming v wild debate is always a hard one. Apparently farmed salmon are fed a dye to make them pink, because in the wild they get the colour from the crill that they eat, and in a farm they don't get these, which really changes how you see the food.
But then there has been overfishing of Cod, so that's not good either. I think farming is ok as long as the animals have a decent life, and there isn't 100 of them in a 2 foot square box. Too often farming is cruel to animal, and probably especially to fish and shellfish.
No doubt soon you will be able to pay double the price for wild mangrove crab as you do for the farmed kind!
Farming may save them from being hunted to extinction, but it's rather sad to know that these creatures came into existence merely for human consumption.
Somehow I highly doubt it. They are adapted to function through stresses such as losing a limb, so I doubt pain is a big issue. If pain is a negligible factor it is highly unlikely that they can be affected by what humans would perceive as stressful situations.
In the planned habitat they will be getting exactly what they need to grow quickly, there will be ample food (Its in the farmers best interests to keep the lil guys happy).
I think the whole 'they live to become food' issue is actually a non issue. Cows live to provide milk and later to be slaughtered. Sheep live to provide wool and to be slaughtered for human consumption.
Finding such practices distasteful is silly. Its been done ever since we evolved from hunter gatherers to herdsmen and farmers. That switch enabled us to stay in one location. Which enabled the development of complex social structures. Which enabled civilisations. Which got us to where we are today.
And anyway, crab meat is yummy :)
Who knows that these crabs don't ponder the meaning of life in their existance?! They're probably wondering why we walk sideways anyway.
I think while animals express pain differently its a bit of a leap to say they don't experience stress. I've seen fish freaking out because there's so many of them in a container that they have to be vertical rather than horizontal. Their behaviour becomes unnatural and weird... like us when we're stressed. Pysiologically they do experience stress as well, which is why is tastes better to cook live lobster in wine rather than water... it gets drunk and so doesn't freak out when its being cooked and so refrains from releasing not-nice-tasting, stress chemicals into its system.
A cow in a field eating grass is one thing, but a cow eating chemically constructed food in a pen its whole life is another. This is why white butter weirds me out!
I tried crab once, or maybe twice, and it was ok, but I didn't love it. Maybe it was the wrong type of crab, or maybe I couldn't get the freaky eyes and legs out of my mind.
I suspect I only like eating animals I like the look of! Which is admittedly counterintuitive.