Weighty Matters

There are some that weigh heavy on one's mind.  Things like: Should we refinance now?  or What was I thinking by eating that second butter biscuit?  Sometimes I lie awake at night worrying about things that might possibly happen, but generally never do.  Like thermonuclear Armageddon.

Our daughter Scarlett, however, ponders weightier things. 

As we were dining on some of the best crab legs to be found this side of the Mississippi River (you must really try Mayflower Restaurants in North Carolina), Scarlett pipes up with the following:

"So what exactly do crabs eat?"

I look at my husband - he looks at me. 

"Um, algae and other sea critters, I think," James replied giving me one of those you can step in and help me anytime looks.

"Well, who first decided to eat a crab, anyway?  They look scary - kind of like a spider," Scarlett proclaims.

Exactly.  What kind of person would ever consider trying something hard, with pinchers, no less, to eat?  I mean, seriously!  So being the hard-hitting, investigative reporter type person that I am, I did a little research.  This is what I discovered:

According to the website http://www.foodtimeline.org/, crabs were used for food as far back as ancient Greek and Roman times.  As foods go, literature and art from those periods seem to suggest that crabs were not really enjoyed as a source of food to those ancients.  Why?  My guess is that someone had not yet discovered drawn butter.  Everyone knows that drawn butter could make even a soccer ball taste delicious.

So it comes down to the fact that no one really knows who ate the first crab.  Probably some Greek housewife was scrambling to come up with something exotic for dinner because her husband sent a message that he was bringing his boss home for dinner.  In the sort of move born from desperation, she ran down to the docks where the only offering were some freaky, spidery-looking shellfish.  She grabbed a few (squealing each time a pincher came near) and quickly tossed them in a pot of boiling water.  I can just imagine the husband and boss' face when she served up a platter of steaming crab.  I bet her husband never let her live that down!

Oh yeah, and crabs eat carrion (dead things - if tuna is Chicken of the Sea, consider crabs the Vultures of the Sea), algae and worms.  I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Now that I am armed with the answers to these questions, I feel ready to handle truly hard ones.  So, why did I eat that second butter biscuit?