When: July 28
National Crawfish Day on July 28th celebrates the small freshwater crustacean that is at the heart of Louisiana and Cajun food culture. Crawfish (also called crayfish or mudbugs) look like tiny lobsters and taste like a cross between lobster and shrimp. The crawfish boil — pounds of crawfish cooked with corn, potatoes, and Cajun spices — is one of America's great communal eating rituals.
Louisiana produces 90% of the world's crawfish — a crustacean so central to Cajun identity that the annual boil is considered a community ritual as much as a meal.
In 1755, the British colonial government of Nova Scotia expelled approximately 10,000 French Acadian settlers from what is now eastern Canada. The expulsion — called the Grand Dérangement — scattered Acadian families across the Atlantic coast, the Caribbean, and eventually Louisiana, where many resettled in the bayou country west and south of New Orleans. They became the Cajuns, and they built a cuisine from what was available: wild game, salt pork, rice, and the crawfish that lived in enormous abundance in the shallow bayous and marshes of the Atchafalaya Basin. Crawfish are native to North America and had been eaten by indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Acadian settlers arrived. But the Cajuns turned crawfish into a culinary tradition. Louisiana now produces approximately 90% of the world's crawfish supply — both wild-caught from the Atchafalaya and increasingly farmed in rice paddies, where a symbiotic rotation works in both directions: the crawfish eat the rice plant...