For years, Yangcheng crabs were mostly found in kitchen steamers in Shanghai and Hong Kong. But now, the crab's rise in power and popularity has begun to parallel China's own: In an urban China of status and money, Yangcheng crabs have achieved, very quickly, a reputation as the finest and purest flavor in the crab palate.

What's more, for an expanding middle class with disposable income, leisure time, and a relatively new love of eating out, the lake crab is an attainable if expensive delicacy. It has a dark green compact shell, hair on its legs and around its underbelly - and nearly all are imported from the Yangtze River as babies the size of quarters.

Markets for authentic hairy crabs, combined with even larger markets of fake hairy crabs, run in the hundreds of millions. Prices for authentic Yangcheng crabs have bubbled up to as much as $45 per crab, from $5 a crab in the 1990s.
Food in modern China is of enormous cultural importance. Seafood is at the top of the hierarchy - something with status to share with friends or on special occasions.

Technically, crab exists in the middle of the seafood hierarchy. It doesn't carry the same status heft as lobster, shark fin, or abalone. But for ordinary Chinese, the crab is special. In the popular imagination of an aspiring middle class, crab reflects prosperity in a way that elite dishes like shark fin probably never will.

Few families would countenance a crab dinner, for example, without the father or mother present. Nor is the delight in the experience of wolfing down chunks of meat, as per the lobster; in fact, a hairy crab has precious little meat. Lake crab is all about savoring the flavor.

Four years ago, to try to block the fakery, Yangcheng fisheries started to lightly torch the crab with a laser ID number as they were pulled from the waters. But that practice has been abandoned. The laser numbers proved easy to duplicate. A $5 stand-in from a nearby lake can become a $35 Yangcheng crab in seconds.

At the height of the 2003 season, more than 100,000 tons of hairy crabs marked with the Yangcheng Lake imprint were sold. Yet the Yangcheng Lake Crab Trade Association report for that year claimed the output of the lake was 1,500 tons.

Source:佚名