When my father retired, after years of holding down two jobs, he finally got the chance to do many of the things he had wanted to do for a life time. He went to TAFE to study English, he went to the Sicilian club and in fact holidayed in Australian and overseas with other members of the club—all retired, and he took up crabbing. He had built a holiday house in the coastal town of Mandurah and every couple of weeks he and my mum spend a week or a weekend there. This is where he did his crabbing, and he was very good at it. We had crabs at every special family gathering and even not so special gatherings.

Two nights ago, as we sat eating a hairy mud crab dish at a very swanky Chinese restaurant, I was telling this story to a group of academics from Fudan University. (It’s hairy mud crab season in Shanghai and everyone’s going crazy over them.)

Yesterday morning, while we were still hanging around the apartment in our PJs, my partner got a call from one of the professors that was at the dinner. He was passing by on his way to work (its Sunday morning) and stopped by to drop off a gift. Steven dressed and went down stairs to meet him. A few minutes later he returned with an interesting looking box.

The box contained 10 or so freshly caught hairy mud crabs. And they were alive.

I have to say I was really touched by the gesture. It was so thoughtful and charming. However, as mollycoddled middle class professionals we weren’t accustomed to killing and cleaning our own food. This got me thinking about how far removed I had become from my parents experience of the world. They grew up working on farms in a poor village in Scilly, growing their own fruit, vegetables and animals. Even in Australia they always kept chooks and killed them in the backyard. When I was a child I would watch mum wringing their necks and hanging them upside down on the hills hoist without wincing. In fact, I loved spending time with her plucking and cleaning the chooks. I have a distinct memory of the smell the chook makes after it’s dunked into boiling water to loosen the quills.

My parents always bought meat in the form of half a baby cow. Then mum would deck the laundry with chopping boards and cleaver, and butcher the carcass. She knew her cuts of meat and did a great job. I don’t remember my parents ever buying prepackaged meat in a supermarket. When I moved out of home in my 20s I encountered packaged meat for the first time. It was strange and unfamiliar, however that changed quickly.

By the time my father started catching crabs I had stopped bothering myself with anything freshly caught or killed. My dad caught and killed them, my mother cleaned and cooked them, we three children sat at the dinner table ate them. Working class parents with middle class children.

Back to our little Sunday morning dilemma; we were looking at YouTube videos on how to humanly kill crabs when the phone rang. It was the professor’s admin assistant. He was worried we wouldn’t know what to do with the crabs so she offered to help. We thanked her but declined. It was time to take some responsibility for the food we consumed and stop passing the buck. I’m part of a middle class generation that likes to talk about ethical farming and processing and then leave the job to someone else. Steven and I both felt it was time to take on that responsibility this time. It was time to honour our parents, for doing this for us for most of our lives, honour Professor Li for the thoughtful gesture and honour the crabs by killing them humanly and cooking them in the best way we could. We did and it was surprisingly simple and not that unfamiliar and they tasted pretty good too.