Crab flavor takes most of the attention at the table, but the shell often decides how much meat you actually eat. When diners target only claws and major leg segments, up to a third of the edible muscle stays hidden in joints, body chambers and thin leg tips that never get opened.
Crab anatomy turns into a quiet filter on value. The body holds compact bundles of white muscle between plates that many people snap off and discard whole. Thin cartilage seams mark where to break the carapace and legs so that chambers open cleanly instead of crushing meat into the shell. Misplaced force cracks the exoskeleton in random lines, leaving flakes of muscle stuck behind ridges and in narrow channels.
Edible yield also drops when diners avoid certain parts out of habit. Gills and viscera are not for the plate, but leg joints, shoulder meat and the central body all contain skeletal muscle that is safe to eat, provided it is cooked through. Skipping these areas, or twisting instead of leveraging existing joints, feeds the bin instead of the plate and turns paid weight into lost protein.
