I'm writing a piece for DCist on Dungeness crab, inspired by the one I bought at whole foods on Sunday.

I spoke to several distributors in Oregon and CA, who noted that everything on the east coast right now is from Alaska, since the CA, WA, and OR season is delayed and is just underway. Of the three options for buying them-- frozen, fresh, and live--the safest bet, according to them, is frozen or cooked fresh, then shipped, since the live ones allegedly need to be cooked right away so they're not listless, turning the meat bitter.

Where have you bought fresh (cooked where caught and shipped, not frozen) or live in the DC area? If you have bought a live one, was the meat as sweet as you had hoped? And, do you have a weigh-in on our chesapeake crabs' flavor versus a shipped dungeness?

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. Did you buy a LIVE one at Whole Foods??? If not, you need to get yourself to the Great Wall Supermarket in Falls Church and check out their crabs. I bought a couple of "Canadian" crabs there last week.

I have absolutely NO use for crabs which have been cooked and then frozen. ICK, ICK, ICK. Frozen Snow crab legs RUINED a risotto I made with it out of ignorance. (Great Wall does have, however, packages of frozen crab meat that doesn't appear to be cooked. It's expensive, though.) You can find live Maine lobsters on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. So, how come you can't find live Dungeness crabs on the East Coast?

Maryland crabs are probably the sweetest. But, they are so small compared to Dungeness, that it doesn't make that much sense to me to "lump" them together.

My bad. They were not frozen at all; they are cooked and shipped. Fedex. Daily. Duh. No wonder they're pretty damn good.

My question is this, and I hope you pursue the answer for your article: Why can we not get LIVE Dungeness crabs on the East Coast the way LIVE Maine lobsters are available on the West Coast? I've been flummoxed by this issue for more years than I care to enumerate

My personal theory is that Maine lobster, being the second tastiest crustacean on the table after my beloved blue crab, commands enough of a premium to justify the constant air-freight. Dungeness...well, let's just say it doesn't do anything for me.