The food industry is truly disgusting...

So much cheating is going on with production and labeling. "Smoked" sausages that are dumped into a bath of smoke aroma instead of being smoked, "wasabi" that's just horseradish with mustard and food coloring, "old" cheese that's only ripened for a month and got the rest of its taste from a bottle, "fruit yoghurt" that only contains 0.2% fruit but the label can say "with real fruit", etc. The list is endless.

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NerdyPotato ·

Crab legs are much more popular than the rest of their body, so fishers break off the legs when the crab is alive and throw the rest back in sea. In nature, crabs can repel their legs if it gets stuck and grow a new one without much pain, so this practice isn't considered abusive or fatal. But when humans remove them, the shell breaks too. That causes a lot of pain, and often both front legs are removed making it impossible for the crab to eat, so they're thrown back alive to starve in pain.

But hey, it's cheaper than taking the whole crab and throwing away the body after killing it in a sort of human way.

basilfawlty89 · 36-40, M

@NerdyPotato reason 95 that I'm vegetarian.

HootyTheNightOwl

@NerdyPotato Sadly, that's not just about cost... The whole crab takes up more space in the tank - and one dead crab in the tank slowly starts to kill the rest because they release a toxin upon death.

Some vessels take days to get into St. Paul Island - and then they might not be able to start offloading the crabs right away. The longer they're in the tank, the higher the chances of dead crab turning up in the tank.

While I'm not looking to make the practice "okay" in any way, it's not, it can sometimes come as a surprise for people to learn why it might be happening.

NerdyPotato ·

@HootyTheNightOwl that plays a role indeed, but it's still kind of about the money. Crab fishers take most crabs with them whole, but they break off the legs of crabs that don't look good enough to sell whole. That's their way of still getting something out of the bad ones.

Vessels looking for fish and accidentally catching crabs, don't even try to take the whole crab. But they break off the legs instead of throwing the whole crab back, again to still get something out of it.