Sixty years ago, crawfish was cheap food for poor people. “My father would say, we’re so poor we’re going to have to eat crawfish,” says Marcelle Bienvenu, food columnist and cookbook author. “I remember my mother saying, don’t eat crawfish in front of strangers because they’ll think you’re barbaric.”

Today crawfish is an icon of Louisiana cuisine. “I think of it as a very indigenous thing,” says Michelle Nugent, food director for Jazz Fest. “Nobody cultivates it, fishes it and eats it like we do.” The boiled crawfish sold at Jazz Fest is definitely local, but the cooked crawfish are just as likely to have been cultivated in the south of Spain or the Jiangsu Province of China.

Louisiana crawfish, at least the peeled tail meat, is now expensive. At their peak, the tails can sell for almost as much as lump crabmeat. Even though local crawfish are widely acknowledged as better tasting, many festival vendors use imports because of the cost and, they claim, a lack of local supply.

“It’s cheaper, but I don’t think it’s as tasty,” says Bienvenu of imported crawfish. “I’ve cooked with it a couple of times, and I’m not very satisfied with the texture of the tails or the taste.” Nugent agrees that the local product is superior. She insists that certain dishes, such as the crawfish rémoulade, be made with Louisiana tail meat. “The rémoulade is a cold product. I think it allows the quality of the crawfish to shine through,” she says. “Whereas something that’s cooked, it may not be quite so important.”

John Ed Laborde, who buys roughly 4,500 pounds of tail meat for his popular crawfish bread, uses a mix of Spanish and Louisiana crawfish. The Spanish crustaceans, he says, taste the most like the local product. Pierre Hilzim also prefers Spanish crawfish over the more common Chinese imports for his Crawfish Monica.

Vendors who use fewer pounds of crawfish are more likely to buy from local sources. Jamila’s Café will use up to 300 pounds of Louisiana tail meat for its crawfish, spinach and zucchini bisque. Wayne Baquet of Li’l Dizzy’s Café will stuff 500 pounds of Louisiana tail meat into 7,000 crawfish heads for his traditional bisque.
The festival does not track how many vendors use Louisiana crawfish. OffBeat spoke with eight of the 14 vendors with crawfish dishes at Jazz Fest, and five of those vendors use at least some imported crawfish, primarily from China.

Nugent and several vendors claim that Louisiana does not produce enough peeled crawfish to supply Jazz Fest. Roy Johnson, director of market development for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, disagrees and notes that Louisiana should generate 2 million pounds of tail meat this year. “By the time the Jazz Fest starts there is plenty of Louisiana tail meat on the market, but at a price,” Johnson says. “What they mean without saying is that they can buy the Chinese meat cheaper.”

“The supply is there if you’re willing to pay for it,” agrees Semolina’s Gregg Reggio, who buys up to 30,000 pounds of fresh Louisiana crawfish tails annually for his chain of restaurants. He pays between $7 and $9 a pound for local crawfish, instead of $4.50 for Chinese imports. “It’s a commitment that we’ve made. We like to help out the Louisiana economy, the Louisiana farmer, the Louisiana fishermen. I’m amazed the places that don’t use fresh Louisiana product.”

Matthew Goldman, the Press and Advertising Director for Jazz Fest, counters that using local products exclusively no longer makes sense. “People from all over the world come here, we have bands from all over the world,” he says, “and to think of specifying one item, and saying crawfish should only be from Louisiana, I think it’s not the way of the world anymore.”

Nugent studied the possibility of requiring that vendors use only Louisiana crawfish, but concluded that fest goers would not pay the premium for the local ingredient. “You wouldn’t be able to afford the food out there,” she says. “And the vendors, it wouldn’t be fair to them.”

For food vendors, Jazz Fest is always a financial risk. “In general, Jazz Fest is good,” says John Caluda of Coffee Cottage, “but you never know. If you have one or two bad days, that’s your profit. I could have 2,000 or 3,000 crawfish strudels left over. You’ve really got to watch your cost in all areas.”

When Quint Davis announced the lineup for Jazz Fest, he trumpeted that 87 percent of the musicians were from Louisiana. Why couldn’t Jazz Fest also let the world know how committed it is to local fishermen, shrimpers and farmers? If the festival won’t require vendors to use Louisiana crawfish, then perhaps it could identify those that choose to. If tourists from around the world don’t know where the crawfish they’re eating are, how will they know what they’re missing?