Making Sense Of Sustainable Food

One of my most treasured childhood memories was crabbing with my grandfather on the Chesapeake Bay in Kenwood Beach, Maryland.

- Nathan Lyon

It was a family rite of passage to one day co-captain my grandfather’s tiny gray boat, a 12-foot-long aluminum rowboat with three wooden planks for sitting either up front, in the middle (to man the oars), or in the back where my grandfather would attach the tiniest outboard motor I’ve ever seen. My time finally came at the age of six when my grandfather gently shook me awake well before the sunrise. He showed me how to properly stack the wire crab traps in the bottom of the boat, bait them with assorted frozen chicken parts, clasp the bait door shut with one of my grandmother’s old wooden clothespins and secure each trap to a 45-foot rope that clipped onto the buoyant object that would ultimately mark each trap’s location under the waves: an empty plastic gallon milk jug marked with paint.