Health & Fitness Tools

Fresh Lobster: A Short Story

17th November, 2008 - Posted by health news - No Comments

Ahhhhh! Just think about forking a succulent bite of fresh lobster 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!

The early colonists didn’t like them much, either. They also considered lobsters to be fertilizer and used them only as food for the poor. They fed them to their children, slaves, and indentured servants. Indentured servants eventually started fighting back and refused to sign contracts until they were guaranteed to only have to eat lobster three times a week. Unfortunately, the children and slaves didn’t have contracts.

Until the early 19th century, people collected lobster clam bake by hand from tide pools along the shore. The first lobster traps didn’t appear until around 1850. Lobster meat was only sold in cans, and the canned meat just didn’t have much flavor, so it wasn’t popular with consumers.

It wasn’t until our modern transportation system developed that live lobsters became sought-after luxury items. Shipped to the big cities, they quickly became expensive luxury food for the higher classes of our population.

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.

During my lifetime I’ve known family members tracing clear back to my great grandmother who was born in 1873. Even when seafood came into vogue, she never ate it. As a Victorian lady, she would never have even wanted to think about throwing something live into a pot of boiling water. After all, women in the Victorian era were sheltered from the harsh realities of life.

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