the chosen state
Fun Facts About Louisiana
Of all the places to release a herd of carnivore-adjacent megafauna, Congress picked the one state that legislates its own snacks and is slowly dissolving into the Gulf. We say this with love. Mostly.
the legal system
They do not have counties, or normal laws
Louisiana is the only state with parishes instead of counties, a holdover from when the church drew the map and nobody has gotten around to fixing it in 200 years. There are 64 of them. It is also the only state running on a civil-law system descended from the same French and Spanish codes as Napoleon's, which means the rest of America agreed on one legal tradition and Louisiana said no thank you.
The pizza law
It is a genuine crime to send someone food or services they did not order. Surprise a person with an uninvited pizza and you are looking at a fine up to $500 and as much as six months. The state has formally decided that a free pizza can be a felony-adjacent act of aggression.
The dentures clause
Bite someone with your false teeth and Louisiana upgrades it to aggravated battery, because the teeth legally count as a dangerous weapon. Somewhere there is a courtroom where this has mattered.
The crawfish statute
Stealing crawfish is addressed by its own specific theft law. Louisiana looked at all the things people might steal, thought hard about the mudbug, and gave it dedicated legislative protection.
Hold on, that one is a myth
The viral one about it being illegal to gargle in public is folklore, not a statute. Same with the rule about how many sandwiches you can serve at a wake. Lawyers file these under internet, not under law. We are not going to pretend they are real just because they are funny.
the official menu
The state symbols are basically a lunch order
Most states stop at a bird and a flower. Louisiana kept going. The legislature has, at various points, sat down and officially designated a state crustacean, a state cuisine, a state vegetable, a separate state vegetable plant, and not one but two state jellies. There is an official state doughnut that is not technically a doughnut and an official state meat pie that very much is a meat pie.
The full spread, all real
State dog: the Catahoula Leopard Dog. State reptile: the alligator, because of course you can keep the alligator. State crustacean: the crawfish. State doughnut: the beignet, which has no hole and is therefore arguably not a doughnut, a fact Louisiana has chosen to ignore. State meat pie: the Natchitoches meat pie. State jellies: mayhaw and sugar cane, plural, two jellies, because picking one would have been rude to the other jelly.
the loophole
You can drink a daiquiri in your car. Sort of.
Drive-through daiquiri shops are legal, and the workaround is a small masterpiece of legal reasoning. As long as the lid is sealed and the straw is not punched through, a frozen daiquiri does not count as an open container. So the shop tapes over the straw hole, hands you the straw separately, and the entire state agrees to pretend the cup of rum in your cupholder is closed. The instant you poke that straw in, you are committing a crime. It was invented in Lafayette in the early 1980s, roughly five minutes after the open-container law passed.
the geography
The state is flat, low, and leaving
New Orleans is underwater, technically
Around 65 percent of the city sits at or below sea level, with the lowest spots several feet under. The city is kept dry by pumps and faith. Into this, in 1910, we proposed adding hippos.
The boot is dissolving
Louisiana loses coastal land at a pace often dramatized as a football field roughly every hundred minutes. The famous boot shape on the map is partly a historical document at this point.
The mountain is 535 feet
The highest point in the entire state is Driskill Mountain, a generous 535 feet, one of the lowest high points in the country. You can summit it in tennis shoes during a lunch break and be home before the daiquiri melts.
the swamp economy
There is a bounty on the orange-toothed rat
Louisiana already ran one import-an-animal experiment, and it went the way these things go. Nutria, large South American rodents with startling orange teeth, were brought in for the fur trade in the 1930s, escaped, and now devour the marsh from the roots up, speeding along that disappearing coastline. The state's response was a bounty: turn in a nutria tail, collect six dollars. Hunters take hundreds of thousands a season. People have also started eating them, marketed as a lean, guilt-free, patriotic protein. Hold that thought for the meat page.
Hold on, that one is a myth
The story that this is all E.A. McIlhenny of Tabasco's fault is too tidy. He released some nutria in 1940, but he was at least the third nutria farmer in the state. The swamp rats had help. Do not let the hot sauce family take the whole rap.
in fairness
The things Louisiana is actually great at
For all the roasting, the state earns it back at the table. Tabasco has been made by the same family on Avery Island since 1868, on top of a salt dome that plunges deeper underground than Mount Everest stands tall. Tony Chachere, a former pharmaceutical salesman, turned a green can of Creole seasoning into a religion. And Louisiana throws close to 400 festivals a year, more than there are days, including a frog festival with frog racing, an alligator festival with gator on a stick, and a wildlife festival featuring competitive nutria skinning.
The point
This is a state that legislates its jellies, drinks in the car within the letter of the law, eats its invasive species out of spite, and parties 400 times a year on land that is actively sinking. Honestly, releasing hippos into it would have fit right in. That is the scary part.