THEY glisten, boiled bright red, heaps and heaps of spiced whole crawfish spread across a dinner table deep in the heart of Cajun country. It's a weeknight at Dwight Landreneau's house, not a weekend, but zydeco music fills the room, and someone has popped open a beer.
Only in crawfish season is such a feast possible.
''This is the best time of year,'' Mr. Landreneau declared, presiding over 60 pounds of the piping hot crustaceans, with his wife, three daughters, mother, sister-in-law and nephew. ''Heck, we boiled crawfish here three times last week.''
The Landreneaus are deeply rooted in this southern Louisiana region of rolling farmland and backwater bayous claimed and cultivated by their Cajun ancestors. For them, the glory of crawfish -- as Louisianians call crayfish -- is as much about taste as it is about tradition and culture. But even in this season of plenty, they and others fear that this hard-shelled symbol of their heritage is slipping away.
Louisiana's crawfish industry is in the battle of its life, its position as the country's leading purveyor of the delicately sweet meat threatened by a flood of less-expensive imports from China. Desperate to hang on to a living and a way of life, the industry has petitioned the Federal Government for an import tariff. A final decision is expected in September.
