Down here in South Louisiana Crawfish are King. Everyone has a favorite way to do a Crawfish boil, and there are slight regional variations on the traditions and techniques. A Crawfish boil is to Louisiana what a Clam Bake is to Massachusetts. Corn, onions, potatoes, sausage, mushrooms and the like go into a Cajun-y spiced broth that's boiling in a giant (GIANT) pot--then you add a sack of live crawfish, let it go for a couple of minutes then take it off the heat and let it sit. Or something to that effect, certain veggies go in early, certain later etc, but you get the basic principal. Then you take the crawfish and spice them some more, then you eat them while they're hot. Its not pretty, but it tastes pretty good. (My veganism has been killed by Louisiana, btw.) Wash it down with some cheap beer.
We met the wonderful Cody Miller at a bar (see the "Our-Fellow-Man" link at the top of the page), and he took us to his crawfish pond to see how the raisin' + catchin' was done. Rice is big down here, and for many rice farmers Crawfish are a bonus crop, raised in the rice field. For Cody, Crawfish is the main affair and he plants the rice solely as food for the Crawfish (which makes them bigger and tastier). There's a special boat that has a big ol' metal wheel at the back that pushes the boat through the muck and shallow water (and it climbs over the levees because it has wheels at the front too....) Wire traps are checked and baited, Crawfish dumped into a tray and put into 40lb purple sacks. Pretty cool if you've never seen it before. A little brutal too. The ponds have about a hundred different kinds of birds, tons of turtles....a whole swampy eco-system. We went on the boat and got to watch Cody do his thing. If you're lucky, I'll get up a video as soon as I have some time to edit a little something!