I grew up on the East Coast, so I grew up eating steamed crabs. Blue crabs in particular (which turn orange when steamed) are the best crabs there are…but it can be difficult to convince foreigners of this fact. It’s difficult because foreigners aren’t usually around long enough to learn how to eat them. A foreigner, should he or she consent to partake, needs a native to teach him how to do so. In theory, we natives took pride in dispensing those lessons. In actuality, we loathed the prospect of foreigners at the table.
We dreaded the foreigner’s presence because we knew that we would have to monitor his or her discard pile and point out all the wasted meat. Wasted meat was more than wasted money (though it was that, too); wasted meat at the crab table evidenced something more profoundly disrespectful. It’s like some tourist overlooked a “Do Not Trespass” sign and trod right into the most sacred room in the most sacred temple. He or she did not understand where he or she was, we startled natives thought, and yet he felt absolutely free to proceed. Us natives, having warily agreed to his or her presence at the table, oscillated between trying to teach the basics of technique and sitting silently horrified. Fortunately, the foreigner got bored with the whole thing after a few half-eaten crabs. At this point, his or her obliviousness was generally confirmed via some version of the comment: “I liked the taste, but it was too much work for to little meat.”
We natives bristled to hear this comment because we natives understood that the work (and the time that the work required) was not a detriment to that deliciousness…it was that which produced a full resounding of the deliciousness. We natives sat down to crabs, you see, for hours. We sat down happily, knives in hands, to work. It was unusual to be giddy about the prospect of going to work, but that’s exactly what we were. We loved our work; we had great respect for the technique, met continuously by deliciousness, becoming indistinguishable from deliciousness. To understand work and pleasure to be bound up together in this way, to understand that the most delicious of all deliciousness was a kind of dwelling, a kind of learned savoring of time, changes a person. We became more than just hungry.