Amanda Kaminsky (UC Merced)
How do you like to eat crawfish? If you live in the United States (particularly in the South), you might boil them in a spicy broth with potatoes and corn on the cob. In Sweden, crawfish boils are a beloved late-summer tradition, seasoned with dill and celebrated with songs and funny hats. If you grew up in China, you might think of them as “little lobsters” (xiaolongxia), a delicacy best served stir fried in a famous thirteen-spice blend and plentiful garlic.
If you live in Kenya, you have likely never eaten a crawfish before—unless, that is, you grew up on the shores of Lake Naivasha, a small freshwater lake in Nakuru county. If you did, you might have eaten this strange local delicacy peeled into chunks of tail meat, fried with eggs, and served with ugali (a stiff maize porridge). You would likely call them “crayfish,” not “crawfish,” and you might understand this word to come from the crustacean’s propensity to burrow into the lake’s “clay” banks.[1]
All of these places—the American South, Sweden, China, Kenya, and many other global locations—have been influenced by a single species: Procambarus clarkii, also known as the Louisiana red swamp crayfish. Originally native to the freshwater ponds and creeks of the southern US and Mexico, these tenacious and resilient crustaceans are today found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia. Outside their native range, they are often considered a highly invasive species. They can outcompete native fish and invertebrates, overeat aquatic plants, and churn up sediment with their burrowing behavior. This can lead to cascades of ecological consequences as nonnative plants and algae proliferate, choking the water’s surface and preventing sunlight from penetrating and birds from hunting.
In Sweden, these risks have resulted in a blanket ban to protect beloved native crayfish species like Astacus astacus. In China, high consumer demand for P. clarkii has largely overshadowed its potential for ecological harm.
In Kenya, the story is more complicated. I conducted fieldwork around Lake Naivasha and in other Kenyan locations in 2021-2022 for my dissertation research on Kenyan-Chinese foodways. In 2026, I published a paper in American Anthropologist titled “Devouring the Invaders: The Racial-Ecological Politics of the Chinese Crayfish Trade in Kenya.” During my fieldwork, trappers and fishers at Lake Naivasha told me a complex story beginning from a place of nostalgia. Simply put, by 2021, the crayfish were largely gone. I was told that they had been depleted by Kenya’s growing Chinese population. Even though most Kenyans do not eat crayfish—they consider them disgusting and insect-like, if they’ve heard of them at all—they were sorely missed around Lake Naivasha. Many people wished for their return.
Several decades earlier, however, crayfish had proliferated out of control in Lake Naivasha, devastating the lake’s ecological balance. Numerous scientific studies from the 1980s through the 2010s documented the effects of this devastation, from declining water quality to the struggling commercial industries for bass, tilapia, and other lake fish. When Chinese migrants began moving to Kenya in the 2010s as part of China’s wider policy of infrastructure development and investment in Africa, their love of crayfish was initially welcomed at Lake Naivasha. The local Nakuru County government began giving away free Chinese crayfish traps—far bigger and more effective than local traps—in order to harvest as many as possible for the growing Chinese market.
By 2018, however, a tipping point was reached. Crayfish numbers plummeted, and fishers began repurposing their extra-large Chinese traps to catch more widely popular species like bass and tilapia. The traps—tecnically illegal all along due to the small size of their netting—were officially banned. Chinese trappers and fishers were also officially banned, named explicitly as a threat to the lake (despite little evidence that Chinese people were the ones doing the trapping). Instead of incentivizing their depletion, the Nakuru County government began blaming the Chinese for unjustly “finishing” the lake’s crayfish and other species. This blame coincided with rising popular suspicion against Chinese investment in Kenya more broadly.
In my paper, I examine the sociocultural complexity of these claims, from the politics of edibility to the long history of global Sinophobic discourse centering on food and species depletion. I reconstruct Naivasha’s ecological history as I trace the region’s remaining crayfish to remote lakes and unregulated ponds in central Kenya. I discover an informal and elusive supply chain, built on word-of-mouth networks and cash exchanges, that continues to provide crayfish to Nairobi’s flourishing Chinese restaurants and grocery stores. The existence of this supply chain further resonates with anti-Chinese suspicions and resentments in Kenya, even as it provides a livelihood for rural trappers and reduces the population of a potentially invasive species.
Overall, the article highlights how crayfish complicate the simple dichotomies of foreign and native, exploitative and benevolent, that often dominate the discourse of Africa-China relations.
So the next time you are invited to a crayfish (or crawfish) boil, whether it’s American-style or prepared in another culinary tradition, take a moment to recognize the incredible distances these small crustaceans have traversed around the globe. From freshwater ecology and supply chain economics, to contentions issues of ethnic politics, it is difficult to ignore the transformative power of the humble crayfish.
[1] The Kikuyu language, spoken by many people in central Kenya, does not distinguish between the /l/ and /r/ phonemes as English does.
FoodAnthropology 