In the book Crab Picking: An Endangered Maine Cottage Industry, author Blossom Kravitz has written about Maine crab-pickers and their experiences, work, and insights about the Maine fishery. The book consists of sixty-two pages of contextual information, historical background, and ethnographic analysis, leaving the remainder of its 287 pages containing the original transcriptions of Kravitz’s interviews from her fieldwork. Included in the transcription pages are some of Kravitz’s fieldwork notes and further contextual information on the interviewees.
Maine crab-picking is a small cottage-industry that is reliant on a bycatch. As Kravitz explains in the beginning of the book, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration defines bycatch as “fish which are harvested in a fishery, but which are not sold or kept for personal use and includes economic discards and regulatory discards.” While Maine fishermen often have the primary goal of harvesting lobster, they also often end up catching crabs “as bycatch” that reside in the same waters. Kravitz’s focus, however, is not on the fishermen but on the even more tedious, difficult and over-looked job of crab-picking. Considered a “cottage-industry” many crab-pickers run and operate their business out of their own homes. Maine crab-pickers will often sell their meat swearing that no bone or cartilage is left in their crabmeat, and this creates relationships with local chefs who swear by the crab of particular pickers whom they can trust to have the cleanest meat.
Kravitz’s fieldwork includes interviews with over thirty-two people from the fishing industry, including crab-pickers, fishermen, seafood distributors, and members of local and state government entities. This cross-section of interviews gives a full-spectrum representation of the nature and status of the fishery. This thorough selection of not just crab-pickers but also the people involved in licensing and regulation, serves to indicate the strong methodology in Kravitz’s work and gives insight into a little-known aspect of Maine’s fishery.
Kravitz’s work then follows the process of crab-picking, from fishing to cooking, picking, packing, and waste disposal. Kravitz does this by utilizing parts of interviews from crab-pickers. These interview sections often reflect insights from crab-pickers about the nature of the work, the industry, and the fishery itself. It is classic, solid, folklore ethnographic methodology.
As she aptly points out, while there has been an abundance of ethnographic work written about the Maryland Blue Crab, the opposite has been true about the crab industry in Maine, and even less about crab-pickers. Perhaps this is because of the crab’s status as a bycatch, or because Maine is so entrenched in its reputation with lobster, but it makes Kravitz’s work that much more important for its contribution to the discussions and work of Maine’s fishery as a whole.
Kravitz concludes her analysis by stating that because of overfishing, crabs could go the way of “cod, hake, and halibut.” Cod for example, has declined ninety percent in three decades.[1] At the same time, with prices for picked crabmeat hovering at $12.50 per pound, crab-pickers are unable to use this income sustainably and new pickers often do not have enough money for the start-up costs. This book highlights the inherent problem with traditional work that is dependent on our increasingly fragile environment: the more fragile the eco-system is, the more fragile are the people who work in traditional occupations. Hopefully, the analysis and transcriptions in this book will help lend insight to an endangered traditional maritime community.
[1] Center for Biological Diversity, “With Cod Numbers at Historic Low, Petition Seeks Ban on Gulf of Maine Cod Fishing,” March 3, 2015.
--------
[Review length: 584 words • Review posted on September 29, 2015]