Lobster

I think about the lobster a lot. Not about eating it, necessarily. (But definitely sometimes about eating it. Favorite lobster roll? Saltie Girl in Boston. Warm with butter.)

If you’ve never read the modern North American history of the lobster, do.

It’s like this-ish: Indigenous peoples harvested lobster for food and fertilizer for forever. It was plentiful. Colonists arrived and needed help so the Natives clued them in that those horrifying demon sea bugs were, in fact, delicious. Et voila: “The New England Lobster bake.”

It wasn’t all good PR for the lobster in post-colonial American culture, though. It was such a plentiful (and cheap) source of calories that at one point it was seen as “trash food”. When it was fed too frequently to prisoners, they fought to have their lobster intake limited. (It was.)

Fast forward and the demon bug is, as with many arthropods over time and history, a sign of indulgence, abundance, luxury, and, even, finding true love.

Isn’t it wild how popular perception of a thing just changes with the context of history? Maybe everything is, in some way, a little bit like lobster.