Born and raised in Los Angeles, chef Ben Small had an outsider's view of the Maryland blue crab. It came in a little plastic bucket, all meat and no claws, the shell ripped away long before it was shipped to the front door of the restaurant.
But on a recent Friday, Small's perspective changed. He bobbed and weaved in a boat on the Choptank River, off Cambridge on the Eastern Shore, the blue crab's front door. Newly relocated to Washington, D.C., he was eager to see the living crab, to learn about its biology, and to understand why his restaurant, The Source at the Newseum, should buy local shellfish, showcase it on the menu and help sustain it.
The field trip was courtesy of a fledgling effort by Maryland to pull chefs out of kitchens to behold the crabs in their Chesapeake Bay habitat and persuade them to buy the local product. Over the Memorial Day weekend, state officials also planned to launch a program called "True Blue," to help consumers distinguish which restaurants use the Chesapeake Bay product for their Maryland crab cakes as opposed to using those imported from nations such as Venezuela and the Philippines.
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