{"id":1504,"date":"2014-04-29T09:46:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T13:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/?page_id=1504"},"modified":"2024-10-09T13:36:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T17:36:03","slug":"tar-heel-blue-crabs-still-the-states-most-valuable-seafood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncseagrant.ncsu.edu\/coastwatch\/tar-heel-blue-crabs-still-the-states-most-valuable-seafood\/","title":{"rendered":"Tar Heel Blue Crabs: Still the State’s Most Valuable Seafood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
What happens to blue crabs when they are landed by North Carolina crabbers? Where are they processed? Where do they go? Jerry Allegood traces the flow of this crustacean \u2014 hard, soft and picked.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a blazing hot summer morning with a steamy haze shrouding the waterfront at Carolina Seafood Co. near Aurora, but it’s cool and comfortable inside the crab-picking room where Flordia Cooper and several other women sit at tables, methodically picking meat from piles of cooked blue crabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cooper takes a crab \u2014 its blue shell turned pink by an overnight steam bath \u2014 cracks it open and nimbly scoops out small chunks of moist white meat that she drops into a plastic container. At age 71, her fingers move like a phone-texting teen. She has a reputation for picking clean meat without bits of shell. Over and over she repeats the process. Bit by bit, pieces add up to pounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I love it,” she says of the work, which she has done for about 30 years. “It’s not hard. It’s just making the pounds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hand picking crab is a longtime tradition on the North Carolina coast, where the blue crab industry is a mainstay of commercial fishing and the state’s most valuable fishery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n