But I want to offend Brother Xun today: human beings must have confessed to eating crabs a long time ago. Where did this come from? We think crabs are ugly, but humans don't eat so ugly, snakes and turtles are beautiful, and we eat all kinds of bugs. Aren't you satisfied with eating hairy eggs? We think crab claws are dangerous, but compared with the horns of bighorn deer, the hooves of wild donkeys and the teeth of mammoths, they are simply harmless and lovely; Moreover, crabs are widely distributed and it is not difficult to catch them. Now, even monkeys (cynomolgus monkeys) living in Southeast Asia often eat crabs. In millions of years of evolutionary history, how could they not eat crabs?
Of course, this is all an inference. The tangible evidence is that a large number of crab shells have been found in the ruins of Liangzhu culture in Taihu Lake basin and Songze culture in Shanghai (Suzhou and Shanghai have a long history of crab-loving culture) more than 5,000 years ago. The kind of "Qingzhou Crab" that Zhou was eating was the earliest crab record in China classical works. It seems that crab is really an ancient ingredient, even much older than most of the ingredients we eat today.
We are going to stop here. "Crab of Qingzhou", where is this Qingzhou? Now there is a county-level city called Qingzhou in Weifang, Shandong Province. In fact, this Qingzhou is also wider than its ancestors. Among the "Kyushu" we often say, there is a place called Qingzhou. For a long time, Qingzhou was the general name of Shandong Peninsula. What's that crab major? It turns out that crab paste is made by chopping crabs and pickling them, and it is often used to deal with sea crabs with extremely strong smell. Inferred from all aspects, Zhou probably ate crab paste made of a kind of sea crab, Portunus.