. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. l n the crab-picking room at Sea Safari, Ltd. in Belhaven, women in waterproof boots, aprons and caps of many colors crowd around tables mounded high with cooked blue crabs. Beneath the audible chaos of many compering conversations is the visual rhythm of hands precisely disassembling crustaceans into handpicked, "gourmet" crabmeat. The scene is its own contradiction. It is similar to crab-picking houses of the past, but the similarity merely accentuates the degree to which things have changed, a
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. l n the crab-picking room at Sea Safari, Ltd. in Belhaven, women in waterproof boots, aprons and caps of many colors crowd around tables mounded high with cooked blue crabs. Beneath the audible chaos of many compering conversations is the visual rhythm of hands precisely disassembling crustaceans into handpicked, "gourmet" crabmeat. The scene is its own contradiction. It is similar to crab-picking houses of the past, but the similarity merely accentuates the degree to which things have changed, and are changing. Local women who learned crab picking at their mothers' knees are rare. Conversations around the picking tables are in Spanish. The picking house is only one in a maze of nondescript buildings collectively called Sea Safari on the Pungo River near the Pamlico Sound. The first clue that this is not an ordinary seafood processing plant is finding yourself eyeball-to-eyeball with a gigantic buffalo head mounted on the wall in a second-floor office area. Sea Safari's owner, Topper Bateman, is an avid hunter, says Sarah Harris, the company's director of research and development. The buffalo was bagged by Bateman's wife on a hunting expedition. While the buffalo on the wall has nothing to do with seafood, it may have, subliminally at least, influenced the name of one of Sea Safari's newest products — the Buffalo Catfish Nugget, a very lightly battered, deep-fried piece of succulent North Carolina aquacultured catfish. The nugget is one of Harris' favorites from the company's line of "value-added" products and represents the expedition that Sea Safari is taking into the brave new world of global marketing. Value-added foods are processed to be different in form, taste and texture from the principal raw ingredients. Barry Nash of North Carolina Sea Grant and the North Carolina State University Seafood Lab says that "value," in this context, means &
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
