Ahhhhh! Just think about forking a succulent bite of fresh lobster meat into your mouth and savoring it all the way down! How could anything taste more sublime? But before you rush out to your nearest Red Lobster and choose your live lobster for a $25.00 lobster dinner, let’s spend a little bit of time getting to know something about the critter that you’re drooling over.
Once upon a time, America was peopled by only Native Americans, and lobsters were plentiful. They were so plentiful, in fact, that the Native Americans used them as fertilizer for farm fields and fish bait. They never ate them! Yuck!
When European settlers started arriving on America’s shores, many of them starved to death, but they still wouldn’t eat lobster meat. They used it for fertilizer, too, plus they fed it to the people they considered inferior: slaves, indentured servants, the poor, and their own children (children weren’t spoiled in those days like they are now!). After word got around that indentured servants were being forced to eat this terrible fare, prospective indentured servants had promises written into their contracts that they wouldn’t be made to eat lobster more than three times a week. Imagine that!
Up until the early 19th century, people could get all the lobsters they needed by snagging them from tide pools. They had no need for technological advances in the harvesting of live lobsters. The first lobster traps didn’t come on the scene until the 1850s. The reason harvesters needed traps is because they had become able to sell their lobsters to canneries. No one ate the lobsters fresh, and the canned version was so tasteless that few people ate them canned, either.
When our transportation system developed sufficiently to transport live lobsters, the meat finally caught on with the public. They were shipped to the finest restaurants in America’s largest cities where only the well-to-do were able to afford to eat them.
Did you ever choose a live lobster from a tank, watch while restaurant personnel remove him, and then have him appear cooked on your dinner plate? It gives you a weird feeling, doesn’t it? Your feelings are only normal. You just have to resign yourself to the fact that the little qualms you feel are all a part of the lobster-eating experience.
My great-grandmother lived most of the way through the 1960s. People around her were eating lobsters and other seafood, but she refused to even consider the possibility. It’s not that she was a picky eater, because she had been raised to eat everything that was put on her plate. It’s just that her sensibilities had been honed during America’s Victorian era when ladies would never even think about something as ghastly as tossing a live lobster into boiling water. Pass me the smelling salts, please!
At least we’ve finally learned to appreciate the quality of a live lobster dinner. The prices have even come down enough that middle-class citizens can afford to eat them, too. We can buy them in supermarkets or from online merchants and cook them in our own homes. We’ve come a long way, baby!