Fishing For Crabs With Condoms In Newtown Creek

It's what's for dinner (photo via New York Shitty)

Locavore eating is still so hot right now, and so is finding new purposes for discarded refuse. Therefore it comes as no surprise that some urban fishermen are using raw chicken and used condoms to catch crabs in Newtown Creek, which, you might recall, was declared a Superfund site last year.

New York Shitty has photographic evidence of the urban anglers in action, with a tale from a reader recounting the catch.

"In just a few minutes they pulled up about a dozen crabs as I watched them toss the chicken leg attached to a rope and haul up crabs two by two (clinging to the chicken leg with their claws). I inquired if they intended to actually eat their catch. And, yes, indeed they were. The one guy I talked to said (in limited English and with hand gestures) that he cleans each crab by putting them in buckets and changing the water ‘four or five times’ over the period of a few hours, then he made a motion like the was scrubbing something with a brush and, finally, the crabs get boiled."

The kicker? The men supposedly use, ahem, repurposed condoms from the creek as "floaters" to signal when their lines have scored "a haul of eight-legged toxic goodness."

If you're wondering whether it might possibly be safe to eat Creek crustaceans, the answer is a resounding no: As the environmental group Newtown Creek Monitor Project puts it in all-caps, "PLEASE DO NOT EAT THE FISH!," which can be contaminated with junk courtesy of everywhere from Peter Cooper's Glue Factory to Exxon/Mobil. Hey, guys, maybe try sticking to the East River instead.