Today in the stadium, the Student Programming Association provides students with the tastiest form of food known to man. We can get our fix after suffering through crawfish withdrawal.Yes, crawfish, that great monarch of the crustaceans, has returned. The almighty invertebrate that should take the place of the pelican on Louisiana’s state flag from now into eternity. More powerful than crabs, shrimp or even sea monkeys.

According to a rice farmer named Thibodeaux Comeaux, crawfish are the direct descendants of lobsters.

He says that crawfish have only been around since about 1775. It all happened when the Acadians were kicked out of their land by the British. The Acadians really liked lobster, so they brought them over from Nova Scotia. However, during the long voyage the lobsters lost their appetite and became smaller. Eventually the Acadians renamed this pygmy crustacean a crawfish.

So, basically crawfish are anorexic lobsters, the Kate Moss of the crustaceans. However, like the tale of Davy Crockett and the urban legend of the kid who exploded while consuming pop rock candy and Seven-Up, this dwarf lobster story needs to be taken with a grain of salt. OK, maybe with the whole salt shaker.

Regardless of the crawfish’s genealogy, the fact remains that the things are delicious. Some claim they are the best food in the world.

There is nothing better than sitting in front of a heaping pile of gleaming red crawfish and going to town like Scooby Doo at a Scooby snack buffet.

The best is when you have crawfish with what Cajuns call all the fixings: potatoes, huge chunks of sausage, corn, onions, lemons and enough spicy seasoning to make your eyes water and your nose spontaneously combust.

The fixings are an important staple of the essential crawfish boil. In fact, as Irving Himel, the custodian of Talbot Hall points out, you can have a crawfish boil minus the crawfish.

“You can have the potatoes, sausage, corn and bag of seasoning and leave out the crawfish. That tastes better to me,” Himel said.

There are many ways to eat a crawfish. It takes a while to master the art of peeling a crawfish. After much practice the technique is mastered: grab head, pinch and twist tail, pull, peel and then devour.

When this process is finally achieved, one reaches a Zen-like state. It’s like the Kung-Fu episode when the old blind sensei told Caine to snatch the pebble from his hand. It took him a while, but when he accomplished it, he was truly a content individual.

Then there’s the controversial act of sucking the head. Real Louisiana natives don’t suck the head; they inhale it. Afterwards, the head is but a hollow shell. Some may say that this is dangerous, that the stuff inside the head may cause damage to internal organs. However, to this day no one has overdosed from sucking a crawfish head.

Such actions, even the actual consumption of the crawfish, are abhorrent to certain people. An old guy at the neighborhood barbershop had a name for these sort of people: Yankees. According to him, these people actually graduated from college, occasionally wore suits, spoke in proper English and have the strangest name for our clawed, bug-eyed friends.

Bonafide Yankee and Nicholls art professor Ross Janke explained their moniker for what we know as crawfish.

“Crawfish exist up north, but there they are called crayfish,” Janke said.

Crayfish? It sounds alien to our southern ears, but this phrase applies to the same crustacean that we actually eat.

Actually, crayfish is the official scientific term for the species. The names southerners use for crawfish are even weirder.

Like crawdads for instance. If crawfish are all dads, then how does the species reproduce without any crawmoms?

Then there are mudbugs. This name doesn’t really make sense, since crawfish are not insects. However, they do spend most of their time in the mud.

Maybe it’s for this reason that many northerners fear eating crawfish. In their eyes, the dreaded crayfish is a vermin that crawls among the muck. However, even northerners can be converted.

“I was very timid about eating them at first, just having three. Now I love them,” Janke said.

On the other hand, there is the rare Louisiana native that does not eat crawfish, as art major Daryl Dunaway proves.

“I don’t like the smell, and I don’t like the taste, but I like the potatoes and corn,” Dunaway said.

Who can blame them for being apprehensive?

If most Louisianians were not socially indoctrinated into eating crawfish, would they even consider it?

If the story of crawfish coming to America as midget lobsters is untrue, what crazy individual decided to pick up this bug-eyed, curly tailed monstrosity out of the ooze and eat it?

In any case, most people are certainly glad they did. Looks can be deceiving. Crawfish are the tastiest bug-eyed, curly tailed monstrosities known to man.

Editor’s note: Originally published in the April 26, 2001 issue of The Nicholls Worth.