Live Lobsters: A Short History

When was the last time you enjoyed a big old juicy lobster drenched in melted butter? I'll bet that just the thought of it is making you hungry for more. Before making a trip to the local Red Lobster for a $25.00 lobster dinner, take a minute to listen to some historical facts about your dinner-to-be.

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!

Since lobsters could be harvested so easily by hand from the tide pools, there was no need for people to devise more technological methods of trapping them. It wasn't until the 1850s that lobster traps first appeared. The lobsters these early harvesters caught weren't marketed live, either. They were sent to canneries. The early canning methods pretty well eliminated the flavor of the meat leaving the resulting product pretty bland and tasteless. Naturally it failed to catch on with consumers.

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.

If you're like I am, you may feel a little squeamish about seeing your dinner lying serene and green in a tank one minute and bright-red and cooked on your plate the next. This feeling, too, dates back to the beginning of lobster-eating. Lobster experts swear, however, that it's the only way to have fresh lobster.

My great-grandmother was raised during the Victorian period of the late 19th century. During her formative years, girls were sheltered from the sordid parts of life. She wouldn't have been able to imagine something as terrible as putting a live animal into boiling water. In her later years, she still couldn't bring herself to eat the seafood that was all the rage with everyone else. Her Victorian sensibilities made the thought of seafood repugnant to her.

It's amazing how tastes change over the years. For centuries the succulent meat of much-maligned lobsters went unnoticed and unappreciated. Then, almost overnight, lobsters moved from obscurity into the fanciest restaurants of the time.