Late Friday afternoon, as usual, finds me at happy hour with my drinking buddy. We’ve opted for McCormick & Schmick’s down by the waterfront.

The waitress comes around to take our food order. I get the buffalo wings and then, just as she’s about to leave the table, I am seized by a reckless daring and decide to get something off the $4 section of the happy hour menu as well. “And I’ll have the Cajun Crawfish as well, please.”

Like most Americans, I am culturally conditioned to expect the food that I’m served to have almost no resemblance to how it would look in its pre-processed state. A hamburger obviously looks nothing like a cow. And it was only a few years ago that I discovered that brocolli doesn’t grow up out of the ground in those nice little clumps like that, and that it is, in fact, a flowering plant.

I expect my Cajun Crawfish to come in nice little nugget sized clumps of crustacean matter, evenly breaded and fried and with a twist of lemon or something. What I don’t expect is to receive a bowl which, once the cover is removed, reveals a half-dozen fully-intact crawfish staring up at me with their beady little arthropod eyes. For the first moment I think they are waving their antennae, as well. I blink, and the illusion of squirming crawfish crawling over one another and waving their claws about disappears.

I realize that I have no idea how to eat them.

I casually mention this. “Do you suppose I just pluck off the legs? I mean, you can’t eat the legs, right?”

“You can go New Orleans style, and just snap the head off and suck the meat out,” my buddy suggests.

I am determined not to let this dish defeat me. I am just a little squeamish about plucking off this crawfish’s head while it’s looking at me, is all. What if it bites or bats at me with its antenna? I’d definitely lose my nerve then.

It’s already cooked, dude. Get over it.

I squish it experimentally, and the shell cracks. I pick out pieces of meat. By the second or third crawfish I figure out that the main body shell can be pried up and off to get at the goods, and the tail can be snapped off and broken open. I proceed to eat the most inefficiently-consumed meal of my life over the next fifteen minutes. I feel like a tool.

That’ll teach me to order off the $4 menu.

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