During our cuisine practical today, the chef prepared a fish stew with a plethora of seafood – scallops, langoustines, crayfish, mussels, cockles, and fish. For some reason I didn’t mind so much when he steamed and shelled the mussels and cockles, but when he got the crayfish, the story quickly changed.

The chef lifts the lid on a box filled with gray-green crayfish. Much to our surprise, the crayfish are alive and are waiving their claws in the air signaling for help. I have a funny feeling they know that the end is near. They’ve been sitting in the refrigerator downstairs since this morning, so they are a bit sluggish.

Ever so nonchalantly, the chef grabs a few crayfish from the box. With a twist of the tail, he deftly pulls out the intestinal tract – while the crayfish is still alive. For a second, I don’t believe what I’ve just seen. That poor crayfish. It can’t feel good to have your intestinal track ripped out while you’re still breathing. He picks a particularly lucky specimen and passes it around on a plastic plate for us to ogle.

I ask the chef why he doesn’t wait until the crayfish is dead. The answer is simple and does make a bit of sense. Once the crayfish dies, all the flesh seizes up, and it would be nearly impossible to get the intestinal track out without cutting the flesh of the tail. It’s important, he says, that the track be removed because otherwise our clients would get mouthfuls of sand and grit.

The chef continues with his work and while he’s mutilating more crayfish, an image flashes in my mind. What if aliens captured people, put us in a box and in the refrigerator? Then an alien chef opens the box, picks a few humans and rips out their vertebral columns before putting them in a hot sauté pan until turn a bright pink. Maybe the alien chef would also put one of us on a plastic plate and pass it around class for the alien students to poke and prod. Hmmm… sounds like a good Far Side cartoon.

Once the crayfish have been mercilessly cooked, the chef does something odd. For presentation sake, he takes the claws, bends them over the heads and sticks them into the tail. It’s possibly the strangest thing I’ve seen yet in class. The crawfish looks like it’s ready to taxi on the runway, not reside on top of a fish stew.

I guess you had to be there to feel the strange hilarity of the situation. On one hand it was uncomfortable and on the other, it just seemed so odd. I know all meat has to die before we present it on a plate, but I like being removed from that part. Seeing it doesn’t make me want to become a vegetarian, but it certainly does make me thankful that it gave up its life to be doused in a red wine reduction!

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