How the Lobster Clawed its Way Up
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But the canning heyday was short-lived. In the beginning, the lobsters dumped into vats of boiling water weighed 3 to 6 pounds each. About one to two lobsters were needed to fill every one-pound can. Smaller lobsters were simply thrown away. In just ten years’ time, however, a three-pound lobster was but a faint memory. Fishing practices had become so aggressive that lobsters couldn’t survive long enough to grow beyond two pounds. Now it took ten or more younger lobsters—many which had never reproduced— to produce a one-pound can. Still, wholesale lobster sold for just 11 cents a pound, while Boston baked beans went for 53 cents a pound. The cost of shelling outweighed the profits from the meat, pushing many canneries out of business.
At the same time, upper-class vacationers from urban points south began flocking to Maine in summer to enjoy the fresh country air, ocean views, and “exotic” seafood. As canneries dwindled, entrepreneurial restaurateurs were thinking up new ways to market the shrinking species. The smaller one- to two-pound lobsters, they discovered, were just the right size to fill a dinner plate. Lobster soon took on royalty status, crowned with butter and herbs, served upon a throne of silver lined china.
When the “fashionable visitors” returned home to Boston and Philadelphia in August, they continued to crave baked clams, fried cod, and fresh boiled lobster. The advent of refrigeration and ice packing allowed fishermen to ship live lobsters along the east coast and as far as Chicago, St. Louis, and even England, where they sold for ten times the original price. Once just a stomping ground for swine, lobster was the culinary craze of the times.
As tourists and wealthy socialites gobbled up tails and claws, it became increasingly difficult for lobstermen to pull their cash catch from the ocean. With the decrease in supply, the price for the now prized dish skyrocketed. Colin Woodard describes the boom in The Lobster Coast: “[A]verage per-pound prices quadrupled between 1889 and 1898, then jumped again in 1904. Between 1905 and 1929, Maine lobstermen increased the number of traps they used by 62 percent and fished over ever-longer seasons, but their catch fell by 28 percent. Only the ever-increasing prices kept an economic disaster at bay.”
Lobster prices hit their first peak in the 1920s, when the going rate was about the same as today’s. But with the Depression, the luxury lobster market took a dive. No one could afford the dish in restaurants, so the lobster was demoted back to the canneries to provide a cheap source of protein for American military troops. Jones marvels, “In 1944, soldiers sat in foxholes in France eating lobster.” Bad times made it easier to get fishermen to abide by conservation laws and the dwindling lobster population was allowed to recover slowly in step with the U.S. economy.
As the decades rolled on, the American palate remained partial to meat and potatoes for the day-to-day, but special occasion lobster meals at fancy restaurants fetched a handsome price once again. From the ‘50s to the ‘70s, consumer demand rose and Homarus americanus was again plagued by overfishing, sending long-term supply in the opposite direction, and prices soared.
The industry has since evened out, in both fishing practices and menu prices, but Glenn Jones is not so sure history isn’t poised to repeat itself in the near future. On today’s menus, four to five pound lobsters appear once again, indicating the opening of deeper waters, 200 miles offshore. “You can expect to see what happened to the inshore fishery happen again offshore,” Jones warns. “Fisherman will go after lobster that make money, capacity will exceed supply. In five to ten years, those big lobsters will be gone.”
April Dembosky is a writer in San Francisco.
