Thousands fill up on Cajun classic at Columbia’s Rosewood Crawfish Festival (+ video)

They can be a little tricky to eat, sort of like lobsters.

They taste a bit like shrimp.

And they look an awful lot like big ol’ bugs.

But people sure were eating them up Saturday at the Rosewood Crawfish Festival.

Mounds of bright red, Old Bay-slathered, Louisiana-bred crawfish – some 10,000 pounds in all – made their ways from the boilers to thousands of mouths at the 10th annual festival.

Sheltered under tents and settled at long white tables, folks tossed back their heads as they sucked tiny bits of meat out of the little critters’ shells.

“It’s a lot of work for nothing, but we can say we’ve done it,” said Carol Henry, a novice crawfish eater, whose fingers fumbled with the shells just to draw out tiny bits of the spicy meat. “They’re good, though.”

Henry and her husband, Bob, were on their way home to Buffalo, N.Y., from Florida and had stopped along the way to visit their friend Crystal McDowell in Blythewood. None of the crew had ever tasted crawfish, so they figured it was as good a day as any to knock something off their food bucket lists.

“It would take us a while to get filled up on these,” McDowell said.

They sat with a pack of wet wipes on hand.

Luckily for the newbies, they were sitting next to Donnie Iorio, an old pro at the crawfish game, who showed them the best way to crack the shells and suck the meat.

Iorio, who graduates from the University of South Carolina next week, learned to eat crawfish as a child with his dad at – of all places – a Chinese buffet.

“It’s like the work of a lobster for the yield of a shrimp,” he said.

He joined Sarah Thomas, a fellow soon-to-be USC graduate and a first-time crawfish eater, for their second of two food festivals in the past couple days. For her part, Thomas had just recently dissected a crawfish in a biology class, and now she was naming them before devouring them.

The pair said they are trying to enjoy every bit of their last few days before real adulthood begins, and they had found a good place to do it.

This story was originally published May 2, 2015 at 9:04 PM with the headline "Thousands fill up on Cajun classic at Columbia’s Rosewood Crawfish Festival (+ video)."