Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
When it comes to animals we eat, there aren't many weirder than the Florida stone crab.
With its Popeye-sized claws and tiny body, this six-inch crustacean folds up into a football in repose and bristles out into an irritable, spiky tank when its blood is up, like any other crab. But that's not what's special about it. Despite its fearsome-looking defenses, it's not pincers that make the Florida stone crab a uniquely sustainable food animal. It's the fact that we humans can eat its claws and they'll grow back. In other words, if it were a Marvel superhero, the Florida stone crab would be Wolverine.
"You harvest them, you take the claw—there's a certain technique you use to ensure that it regenerates—and it's one of those things that's done so fast that you're done and they're back in the water before you even realize it," says Justin Bruland, 28, a Marathon, Florida, native who's the captain of his own fishing boat. "The part you eat is the claw, and it regenerates, whereas with a lot of other crabs, you harvest the body whole for the meat or legs, and once you tear those legs off, they're done for."
Bruland's the third generation of stone-crab fishermen in his family. His grandfather moved down from Brooklyn to the peninsula, opening a motel, then buying boats, and eventually operating his own fish and crab boat in Key West. His father grew up fishing, lobstering, and crabbing, and has been continuously for some 45 years. "The joke was my parents would go fishing and keep me in a playpen with a beach towel on top of it," Bruland says. "I was out on boats before I could walk."
Though it's a strictly enforced sustainable industry now, back then; Florida stone crabs weren't always used as a nearly infinite source of tasty seafood. "It's changed over the past 30 years," Bruland says. "When people first started eating stone crabs, they would wait until they were on their way home to crack them, and then throw the rest of the crab out. Now we crack the crabs as we're going."
Florida stone crabs, which are mainly found on the Gulf of Mexico side of the Florida peninsula, can only be legally harvested from October 15 to May 15. Fishermen like Bruland go out in sturdy 45-foot boats with crews of three or four, and set down hundreds or thousands of traps on the rocky seabed 35 to 70 miles off of the coast, leaving shore before the sun rises and returning as it dips below the horizon, rain or shine. The traps, which are usually baited with pig's feet, are smaller and more cube-like than lobster traps, and they're made of milk-crate plastic instead of wood—natural predators, like octopuses, sea turtles, and big fish, will target trapped crabs, and can easily chew or claw through wood. When Bruland pulls out the plastic traps, he can see the gouges left by would-be diners.
After a certain period, they return to the traps and haul them out. And that's where the critical step takes place that makes the stone-crab industry uniquely sustainable. The key is popping off the claw while keeping the crab alive—the crab evolved the ability to regenerate its limbs over and over again so that it could sacrifice an extremity or two to escape from its enemies. "It's got to be a clean break," Bruland says. "You want to hold the belly down, crack off the claw, then throw back in the water 30 seconds."
The arms are then graded according to size, taken back to the docks, and boiled in a big vat before being shipped to restaurants and fishmongers—the sweet, flaky-dense flesh of stone crabs is traditionally eaten cold, served with a mustard-mayonnaise sauce. The crabs, meanwhile, take about a year to grow their claws back. The Monterey Seafood Watch gives Florida stone crabs its Best Choice seal of approval for sustainability. "We've always cared about the fisheries, but as time goes on, you learn better ways and techniques to better manage the industry—nobody wants to see it go away," Bruland says.
One of the key relationships that the crabbers have developed is that with the restaurants and customers they serve. Working closely with places like Miami Beach's Joe's Stone Crab restaurant, many of the fishermen supported the state laws that were put in place decades ago to guarantee that the ocean's bounty of sweet claw meat would keep on coming for generations to come. Family fishermen like Bruland now work closely with Joe's, ensuring that they get plenty of work during stone-crab season, that the restaurant gets its fill of the seafood it's famous for, and that customers dig into the finest crabmeat in the Gulf.
Meanwhile, the relationship between fisherman and stone crab remains an unusual one in the farming world, one that's almost more akin to harvesting fruit from an orchard than anything in the meat or seafood industry, and it's one that benefits all involved, from the crab populations to the fishermen to the landlubbing diners who can be assured that they'll get to enjoy the sweet delicacy for the foreseeable future. "I want to see this industry stay around, and I want to be able to pass this down to my nephews," Bruland says. "Consumers are going to be able get crabs in the same respect, and stone crabs are going be around for a long time."