The price of crawfish

Seems like we were just talking about this last month. It's worse than you might think and has been for quite a while. 

Two Mexican citizens who worked for Crawfish Processing LLC last year filed suit in Alexandria federal court Thursday, claiming the company and its owner, Charles Bernard, routinely failed to pay minimum and prevailing wages. Plaintiffs say they also did not receive federally mandated overtime pay while working more than 60 hours per week.

The company also collected $60 per week as rent payments for rat-infested trailers packed with eight or nine people, according to the lawsuit. Also allegedly deducted from weekly paychecks was a $3 fee for cashing checks at a retail market affiliated with Crawfish Processing.

Not surprising in a state like Louisiana, where the legislature continues to debate the "good and bad" of and, in fact, defend the legality of slavery, that this would be allowed to go on.  Even if the plaintiffs win in this case, don't expect these practices to change in the future.

The price of crawfish

A group of seafood processing workers in Breaux Bridge are suing to get rid of a loophole that allows plant owners to pay a lower "prevailing wage" because they employ some migrant workers who are on H-2B visas.  

Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.

The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one small way the rules are deliberately written to take advantage of workers the government confers a more precarious status upon to lower the standard for everyone. It's an example of how allowing any class of workers to be exploited causes everyone to suffer. The lawsuit estimates the overall effect depresses wages by as much as $5 an hour. 

Of course, as we've seen before, the real costs of this system can be much higher. 

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

The boil order (and street flooding) decade

We'd say last weekend was pretty wild but we're used to it.  A lot of rain in the space of a few hours, the streets all flood. Water gets in houses and businesses and cars. Would you believe this whole sack of crawfish just came floating by our front door?



Well, okay, we made that part up.  But we would believe it.  Just another mid spring Sunday in the City That Floods.

For all her efforts to rebrand New Orleans as the “City of Yes,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell may have actually stumbled on a more fitting slogan for the area less than two weeks into her term.

“We are a city that floods,” the recently inaugurated mayor said after a May 18 storm drenched the region last year.

Nailed it. Hashtag CityThatFloods.

"When we take on too much water at any given time, we will have street flooding," the mayor tweeted out then. "We have to be prepared."

For residents, that means hustling to get vehicles to higher ground, lashing trash bins and lawn furniture to something solid and hoping that the turbines, pumps and their operators are all fully engaged at the Sewerage & Water Board.

Yeah, I remember that one. It's been an eventful year in office for Mayor Cantrell. The, "hey, it's a city that floods" bit seemed like so much unintentional comedy at the time. It got less funny, though, as the year went on and the mayor's pattern of blaming residents for the bad things that happened to them came more and more into evidence.  Sewerage and Water Board's billing software is an unholy mess but the real problem is you guys are deadbeats.  We fiddled with the traffic cameras without telling anybody but the real problem is y'all have a "laissez-faire approach" to life here in the Big Easy. There's been a brief spike in violent crime but the real problem is, y'all are bad parents.

Last Sunday morning a pumping station lost power during a heavy thunderstorm. What were the real reasons for that? Well let's go through the usual theories to see if we can come up with something.  We'd say it was because some employees fell asleep but that's who we blamed it on last time.  We've also already played the runaway truck card.

We could say it was some sort of wayward animal. We've already used up squirrel, also raccoons, more than once, I think. There was one very famous cat. There's no shortage of mischievous critters crawling about New Orleans, but even so, we're running out of suspects.

It seems we've landed on lightning strike as the main culprit for the Mother's Day flood. But it's odd that it would strike five times. At the end of the day the real problem is most likely to be our negative attitude.

But there's been little to disabuse us of our fatalism in recent years. SWB's leadership aren't even trying. They even brought a graphic to this City Council presentation listing the 28 boil orders we've experienced since 2010.  That can be a real downer.  But the punchline is they can't even get that right.  McBride actually took the time to fact check the "28 boil orders."  It turns out some of SWB's tally include some pressure drop incidents during 2011 that never resulted in boil orders. But their count also omits three actual boil orders while getting some dates and details wrong on some of the others.  In the end McBride still counts 27 total boil orders.  The 2010s are indisputably the Boil Order Decade.  What does it say that the agency responsible for issuing those boil orders can't even count them?  Is there a similar count of major street flooding events since the August 2017 flood?  Mother's Day was at least the third since then that compares.

Maybe we can answer that later. But for now what's really important is that we did, in fact, have all those crawfish last weekend. And maybe they didn't quite float up to the door with the flood. But we went ahead with the boil order anyway so as not to take any chances.



As it turned out, this was more than we had enough people to handle.  Which is how we ended up with enough left over to make a crawfish bisque.



This is a rare thing for a couple of reasons. One reason is there usually isn't enough leftover to work with. Also the process takes a little time and there usually isn't enough of that either. This is normally something I talk about wanting to do throughout crawfish season but never get around to.  It's not very difficult. And, beside the crawfish and the time, it doesn't take much of anything special.  Here's the method.

First, peel your crawfish.

As you do this, obviously, you'll reserve your tail meat and whatever fat comes off with it in a container. It's hard to say how much you'll need. You're starting with some undetermined quantity of leftover boiled crawfish in the first place. I think we ended up with maybe 5 or 6 pounds altogether. I didn't even use it all. There's still some in my freezer now.

As you are peeling, you will want to reserve some of the claw shells and some of the tail shells in one pile. Use these to make a stock. Just throw them in a pot with some water and bring it to a boil. You can add onion and celery if you want.  Let it simmer a while and then strain.

Meanwhile the heads go in their own pile. Use a butter knife (or maybe a thumb you don't mind scratching up pretty good) to dig out all the guts so you are left with a pile of hollow carapaces.  Set that aside for a minute.

Next, make the stuffing.

Chop yourself up some onion, celery, bell pepper, garlic, maybe some parsley, as finely as possible. Saute in butter. Grab about... oh I dunno... maybe half a pound to three quarters of a pound of the tail meat and mince that up real fine as well. Add the meat to the vegetables in the pan.  You can season this with a little Tony's or just salt and pepper or crab boil or whatever. But if your crawfish boil was well seasoned already you probably won't need much. As that cooks, add about a cup of bread crumbs to thicken it up.  Next, beat two eggs, temper them with a bit of the stock, and add this to the pan as well. Stir until you get the consistency of, well, stuffing.

Stuff the heads

Each crawfish head should take a spoonful of stuffing.  How many do you need? I don't know just keep going until you run out of either heads or stuffing. I counted 34 by the time these went into the oven.



They go in a 350 degree oven for 15 or 20 minutes. However long it takes to brown a little bit.



Meanwhile you still have to make the bisque.

For that you're gonna need to make a roux. You guys know how to do that. It doesn't have to be very dark.  Just a medium blonde is fine. That gets more onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic. I also put in a can of tomato paste. It was pretty thick.

Once the vegetables cook down a bit you can start adding your stock. You're going to want a mildly thick soup. The seasoning isn't complicated. Salt, pepper, red pepper, Tony's, crab boil, whatever you have and however much you like. I think I added some thyme.

Add, roughly, a pound or a pound and a half of the crawfish tail meat you peeled earlier and bring to a simmer.  I also added some green onion and squeezed in a lemon.  After simmering for a while, go ahead and add the stuffed heads to the pot. It looks like this.



Some people want you to take the "faces" off of the crawfish heads before you stuff them but that's no fun as far as I'm concerned. Look at those guys floating around in there. It's adorable. Serve over rice, of course.



If you took the time to stuff a lot of heads this is where that work is rewarded. Everybody gets more in every bowl. You don't want your guests jealously tallying up the heads and concluding they haven't gotten their "fair share." Ideally there will be so many everyone will lose count. Much like we have with our boil orders.

Nature found a way

Yeah. It's mutant crawfish. Pretty much.

"Attack of the mutant crawfish" sounds like a B-movie film cobbled together to grab Louisiana tax credits. But in Europe, that horror is real.

Marble crawfish, reports the New York Times, are exploding in Europe and marching into Madagascar. The strange crustacean, which likely sprang into existence 25 years ago, lays eggs without mating.

One marbled crawfish can produce a batch of hundreds of eggs. All female. All exact genetic clones of the mother.

The asexual breeding is what has driven the species' growth, crowding out native crawfish.

Just wanted to remind everybody. This movie was actually made already. 

Pipelines are so good

Van Ness Feldman lobbyist Mary Landrieu wrote to the Advocate this week in support of the proposed Bayou Bridge pipeline through South Louisiana wetlands. As is standard practice in rolling out these talking points, Landrieu highlighted the project's safety.

Bayou Bridge will employ state of the art technology, displacing the far more perilous modes of truck, rail and barge/ship transportation. The pipeline will provide significant economic benefits to Louisiana, including jobs during construction, jobs at the pipe manufacturing facility near Baton Rouge and taxes paid to the state and parishes.

And then wouldn't you know, the very next day... 

A fire at the Phillips 66 pipeline near the Williams Discovery natural gas plant in Paradis continued to burn Friday morning (Feb. 10), hours after an explosion injured two workers and left another missing. The area immediately around the plant has been evacuated.

St. Charles Parish officials and representatives from Phillips 66 will talk about the pipeline explosion and fire during a news conference Friday at 11 a.m., the parish announced.

The news conference will be held at the parish's Emergency Operations Center in Hahnville and will be broadcast live on the parish's government channel, Cox Channel 6 and U-Verse 99.

According to a 2 a.m. statement from Phillips 66, the pipeline had been blocked in and the remaining product in the line continued to burn. The pipeline, which runs from Venice to Paradis, carries y-grade, or raw, natural gas liquids.

It's unclear how long it will take the fire to burn out. St. Charles officials remained at the site as of 8 a.m. Friday.

Almost immediately Landrieu's colleagues in the oil and gas apology business issued a #NotAllPipelines statement. Not everybody is buying that, though. 

"The oil industry and the elected officials they've bought off will have a thousand excuses about this accident," said Anne Rolfes, Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. "They'll say that this is a natural gas pipeline, not oil. They'll say that new technology would have prevented it. But the fire and the explosion speak for itself. Pipelines are dangerous and we don't want more in Louisiana." 

This afternoon the fire was still burning but should be out shortly.  So, if you've got a really big boiling pot, now might be the time. 

As crawfish season rolls on, the prices continues to tumble. This week, the average price for boiled crawfish around New Orleans dropped 33 cents to $4.68 a pound.

Still too damn high, if you ask me. But it might be your only option for at least another month. 

Louisiana’s vast estuary coastline has historically netted a tremendous crab harvest. The state is by far the nation’s top blue crab supplier, producing an annual average of 43 million pounds. But lately state officials have seen warning signs of over fishing.

Louisiana’s blue crab fishery is certified sustainable, which means local fishermen can assure buyers their product comes from a healthy, well-maintained resource. As part of that certification process, there are benchmarks for tracking the condition of the fishery.

“When we cross those benchmarks, we have to take action so we don’t run past the point of no return,” said Jeff Marx, crustacean biologist with the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Last summer, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission approved a crab fishing closure for 30 days each year in 2017, 2018 and 2019, beginning the third Monday of February.

One wonders how much healthier our fisheries might be today were it not for the past century's worth of spoilage at the hands of oil and gas exploration.  Maybe Mary can address this in her next letter.

Portents

Think of this tub of live crawfish as the American electorate and the object in the background as November.

The real victims

Sure the ice is melted but the long term ramifications are only beginning to become apparent.

The prolonged cold also means crawfish aren't eating and are likely to be smaller than normal at the peak of crawfish season, said farmer David Savoy of Church Point.

People may have to order ahead even at the peak of the season, said Craig Lutz, an LSU AgCenter professor and aquaculture specialist.

"I think it's fair to say that when we get to Mardi Gras and we get to Easter, we're definitely going to be behind what we would be in a normal season. There'll still be crawfish available. But I think people are going to have to plan a lot better to make sure they have crawfish on those weekends when they want them," he said Wednesday.

Ok but before you freak out, know that we've been down this road before and things have turned out relatively fine.  In fact it seems like there's at least one crawfish pricing scare article published per year at about this time.