The Liberating Pleasures of Eating Meat With Your Bare Hands

The best way to eat meat is straight off the bone or out of the shell—with your bare hands, BA’s Serena Dai writes.
simple graphic red illustration of crab legs
Illustration by Tamara Shopsin

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In Underrated we review the ordinary rituals we build around food. Next up: eating your food by hand.

It’s the kind of thing that makes time disappear. I go into a trance state, letting everything else fade into the background. It’s falling in love. It’s meditation. It’s the act of eating sweet, fresh Dungeness crab with my hands—cracking the shells with my molars, sucking the sinewy meat into my mouth, and letting the oceanic juices dribble down my wrist. 

Plenty of tools exist to make mealtimes in modern society easier. You know, chopsticks, forks, knives, crab crackers, etc. I appreciate these human innovations. But in matters of food, few things bring me more joy than the primal activity of eating meat from a shell or off the bone with just my hands.

Many of my most memorable dining experiences share this element. In Gothenburg, Sweden, my friends and I visited a fish market in a building designed to look like a church, and because we confused our pound-to-kilo conversion, we ended up with way more shell-on shrimp than we anticipated. The pink shrimp was firm, clean, and bright, each one lined with a neon orange lining of roe. We had nowhere to eat but a bench outside in freezing Scandinavian winter. Still, we were dedicated to slurping this salty fruit and tearing apart the plasticky exteriors—forcing our numb fingers to move so that we weren’t wasting precious finds. 

Years later in steamy New Orleans, we ordered two bags of shrimp, crawfish, and crab legs coated in Cajun spices to eat in a park. The intoxicating blend of peppery, garlicky seasoning rushed into my nose when I untied the tops. I entered a similar daze of hand-demolishing hard shells for soft flesh, this time licking my fingers for jolts of salt and chugging light beer to wash it down. When we were done, we napped in the sun, like lions after a hunt. 

It’s not just seafood that benefits from hands-on eating. As a teenager in the suburbs, trips to Buffalo Wild Wings meant sauce-covered hands and inflamed tongues. Trips to out-of-town Chinatowns meant platters of Cantonese barbecue duck wings, whose rich and grainy marrow could be teased out of their brittle bones. The best way to describe how I eat all of these things is that I gnaw. I snap tendons from their joints, and I slip my tongue into bone crevices to find lingering slivers of meat. No part of the animal goes to waste.

Eating by hand is, of course, not unique. It’s a common practice across many countries, with the etiquette varying by culture. Some in the US have implied it’s uncivilized or barbaric, which it’s not—unless I am doing it. I wouldn’t fault anybody for seeing me down a chicken wing and considering me feral. I relish in it. I love to eat plenty of food by hand on a more regular basis, like tacos, corn on the cob, tibs with injera, naan with curry, or a crudités, and it’s enjoyable albeit routine. But eating meat on the bone or in the shell feels rarer. My more ravenous self appears on these special occasions, and when I tear into the food with nothing but my fingers and teeth, it’s the closest drug-free way I have to forgetting that I am an anxious, responsibility-laden human. I am animal, I am earth, I am part of something bigger than myself.

It’s an experience where shame must fade away, and most “rules” could never be enforced, which is why the best way to eat with your hands is with people who you love. It is the ultimate communal experience. There’s no need to impress, and the only correct way to eat is to eat. It can also be a slower process, as you can only grab so much with your hands at one time. (According to the Ayurveda, the Indian medicinal practice, eating with your hands helps with digestion.) These are meals where, distracted by the act of slurping and cracking and licking and laughing, you don’t get full for quite some time. Then suddenly, you are more full than you ever could have imagined.

I’ve had partners and met friends who are not fans of this sort of dining. These are people who opt for the made-up “boneless wing” over a bone-in one, who leave a prawn head for the compost instead of sucking its brains dry. “It’s too much work,” goes the refrain. These are able-bodied people, who otherwise could use their hands. And I get their perspective, and yet I am sad that they do not feel what I feel. 

To me, this sort of laborious eating is not a means to an end but the whole point itself. It is not consuming, it is living. It is time spent and spent well, and it is celebration. It is what reminds me to not think so much about decorum or manners or what’s “right.” It reminds me I can just do, that I am also just another living creature in the world, that I am blessed with abundance, at least for the moment. It’s just me and the crab. And it’s so so sweet.