The Netherlands Will Never Be Rid of Louisiana Crawfish

Confronted with a seasoned, boiled, arguably delicious crayfish, some of the people of the Netherlands are not sure exactly what to do.

“Do you suck the head out?” I heard from the table next to me earlier this summer, at Two Chefs, a restaurant in Amsterdam that hosts a monthly crayfish boil.

Yes is the answer: The best way to eat a crayfish is to shell the tail, then slurp the flavored juices out of the head, and pick out the remaining meat with your hands.

This strategy might not be an immediate transatlantic hit.

At the boil, one 29-year-old from Maastricht likened the meal to shrimp but with more work.

Two twins told me that the crayfish would need to look a little more chic on the plate to appeal to the Dutch public.

But, given the ever-growing population of crayfish in the Netherlands, coming around to eating more of them could benefit the country.

Because if Dutch consumers aren’t sure how they feel about crayfish, crayfish inarguably love the Netherlands.

They have invaded the country’s waterways so thoroughly that they have become a real problem, and dealing with them will mean persuading more creatures—including Dutch people—to eat more crayfish.

The crayfish invasion started decades ago, but in recent years, the red swamp crayfish (also known as the Louisiana crawfish) has become a particular pest, Pim Lemmers, an ecologist at Radboud University who has dedicated his career to researching crayfish, told me.

In the 1980s, it was brought to the Netherlands as food, and people naively released the animals into the environment.

The waterways in the Netherlands are very interconnected and became a “crayfish highway” of sorts, Ivo Roessink, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at Wageningen University & Research, told me.

But crayfish can walk and breathe on land, too, and have been spotted in parks, along bike lanes, and at Schiphol airport, where the birds use the runway to crush them.

And they can dig—burrows up to three feet long that can collapse the edges of fields into the water and that some people fear could damage the country’s extensive system of dams, dikes, and canals.