FISHERIES: Blue Crabs

One muggy morning in 1932, a 33-year-old Maryland real estate man named Sterling Grover Harris (who had made a good thing of buying Eastern Shore lands from farmers, reselling to rich Northerners) wandering around the Chesapeake Bay fish-docks, found a Negro shoveling savory blue crabs into an incinerator. No slugabed, Businessman Harris poked his nose into the crab industry, found 1) that blue crabs will keep for only a few days in ice, 2) that they had never been canned successfully, because their flesh turned a poisonous-looking blue.

Last week a paper—”Canned Atlantic Crab Meat, A New American Food”—was presented before the American Chemical Society’s meeting in Boston. Its authors: a neat, greying food scientist from the Massachusetts State College, Dr. Carl Raymond Fellers, and Businessman Harris, now president of Blue Channel Corp., crab-packers.

The paper explained that blue crab canning has heretofore been impracticable because the crabs have unstable protein molecules, which, in the heat required for canning, release copper, cause blue copper oxide to form. By dipping the meat in a solution of sodium chloride, lactic acid and aluminum salts, the new process seals the copper into the crab proteins.

Blue Channel Corp. has patented its process, is still the only firm in the country packing blue crabs in sealed cans. Its factory at Port Royal, S. C. buys the crabs during the day from sleepy Negro fishermen, packs them before the next dawn—150 cases a night.

Only a fraction of the total U. S. crab catch is canned; most of it is sold iced or half-cooked, is so perishable that it can not be shipped very far inland. Until the Fellers discovery, the only domestic crab-meat inland regions could get, was from dungeness (West Coast) crabs, which last year were 95% of the U. S. canned pack of 648,000 pounds. Significant, therefore, is the Blue Channel Corp.’s process, because it offers a new source to satisfy the U. S. appetite for crabmeat, which far exceeds the domestic supply: in 1937 the U. S. imported over 11,000,000 Ibs. of crabmeat (for more than $3,000,000), over 75% of it from Japan.

Advantages of Japan against her new competitor are: 1) her supply-source is prodigious—she has big (two or three feet across), murderous-looking king crabs, each of whose arms provides two cans of crab steak, 2) her crabs do not require treatment to prevent discoloration.

One advantage which Dr. Fellers claims for his blue crabs is that “struvite” (harmless crystals of magnesium ammonium phosphate which occur in nearly all canned fish products) is not found in eastern crabmeat. Many fish packers are troubled by struvite lawsuits, for their customers crunch the crystals between their teeth, think they have been chewing glass.