If you read "Consider the Lobster" (which you should), you'll note that the product did change. Lobster used to be cooked dead, then canned in saltwater. Now it's cooked live and served immediately with a hefty side of melted butter.
Sure, maybe the class-based issues made it less likely that people would be willing to try even lobster done right, but I don't think lobster as it was once served would have much more success today.
That's weird I've never heard of anyone eating dead lobster, anyone around my region wouldn't consider eating a dead (hardshell) lobster even if it died in front of them.
I know years ago only the poor kids ate lobster, if you had a lobster sandwich at school you were taunted. First Nations people here used to use lobsters as fertilizer for their crops.
There are a lot of lobster fishermen in my region, my uncle and cousins fish lobster, right now there is a glut of lobster and processing plants have put restrictions on how much they will accept from fishermen. This was after a strike by fishermen last month trying to force processors to give them $5/pound but after a few weeks of being on strike they're only going to get $3/pound.
I know it's a living creature but it's pretty basic as far as intelligence goes I don't eat it but a knife to the brain or instant death in boiling water doesn't seem too cruel, not nice but not cruel. People eat oysters live, boil mussles and crabs alive and they're not too far from a lobster.
I still wouldn't want to eat it three times a week. It is quite strange that it's considered a delicacy, if you look at live lobsters up close they are kind of disgusting and really just look like giant insects that happen to live in the water. They do look much more presentable after being boiled/steamed (color change) and presented on a plate with garnish, though.
My Grandfather grew up in New Brunswick, Canada. His mother and father were servants and he ate lobster every day for lunch during elementary/grade school. He would hold his sandwich so that no-one could see that it was lobster.
They cooked lobster alive back then (1930s), so the cooked dead thing must be region specific.
there's a difference though between "just-killed fresh" and "cooked alive fresh". i would prefer the former without hesitation. though canned is def not a great alternative.
As Thomas Bushnell once pointed out to me, lobster has the interesting characteristic of being delicious, but making you very sick if you eat it all of the time. The diaries from which we get the descriptions of how horrible people around Massachusetts Bay thought lobster was, ALSO contain descriptions of how wonderful it was. It was only after having little choice but to eat it frequently that their extreme aversion developed.
Try it. Try to eat lobster every day for a month. See what you think about it then.
I've done a much more moderate version of this with oysters. Last winter I decided to try to eat oysters at least twice a month, because I really liked them. At one point, they became a lot less appealing, and so I stopped. I can only imagine how bad it would be with trying to eat them daily.
I'm a yankee transplant (just to show that I didnt grow up around it) in the New Orleans area and I eat oysters 3-4 times per week (for more than 2 years). Sometimes cooked, sometimes raw. It's like bar food around here.
Isn't lobster one of the foods that is only as tasty as how you cook it? If you are poor and eat it because you can't afford anything better, you probably don't have the asparagus, butter and lemon.
Lobster is not a delicacy in New England, and eating at a lobster pound is the New England equivalent of a German biergarten. One of the reasons why the price has dropped so much is that the lobster fishery is managed for sustainability.
I think the stuff about humanely killing the lobsters is hogwash. Boiling and eating a live lobster is one of the few meals where you have to confront the fact that we kill so that we can eat. Hold them upside down, plunge the lobster headfirst into the boiling water, and give thanks for life. And make sure you have a pot with a heavy lid.
Now about PBR... being from the Midwest and a bit of a beer snob PBR was largely the defacto-standard because it was the cheapest lawnmower beer that wasn't a BMC (Bud-Miller-Coors).
The same could be said about lobster - there's a story behind it.
Sure, 'they're all made up'... so is the value of gold, but they also have some interesting history behind them if you are willing to go beyond the surface.
the gold being made up is actually not true: Gold was valuable because it had precisely the properties of good currency - it was useless, moderately rare, fungible, divisible, easily portable, and very easy to authenticate (a black stone is sufficient to distinguish between say 80% gold and 100% gold with proper standards).
> Same could be said about flank steak which used to be a cheap cut of steak.
That was skirt steak, though flank steak has also shot up in price due to its newfound popularity (presumably because it's fairly lean, fairly tender, and easy to prepare).
Skirt steak is still considered one of the poorest cuts; I have found that none of the butchers in my city will provide it unless you explicitly ask for it.
I can't often find skirt steak in stores, either, but I was under the impression that this was due to the high demand from restaurants.
I don't consider skirt steak a poor cut by any means. It has a great amount of flavor and is tender enough to be cooked with high heat (though certainly not as tender as the best steaks). I often see "eye of round" and similar cuts sold as "for grilling". Those are what I consider poor cuts (for grilling at least), and I would much rather have skirt steak.
I should have added that it's not very tender, so it's considered a poor cut to use as-is, in most cases, unlike other prime cuts. Fajitas is the only dish I know about that uses skirt steak without grinding it up first, and even then, it is (as far as I know) always marinated first. But I don't pretend to be an expert, just a foodie.
In my country, I believe skirt steak always ends up becoming ground beef for things like hamburgers. Which is a bit odd, when I think about it, since most stores do carry rump (aka round) steak cuts, which is also a not very good, not very tender cut. That's what I think you mean by "eye of round"?
There's no question that it's not the most tender, but like hanger steak, it's prized for flavor rather than tenderness. It's great grilled so long as it's cut properly.
Out of curiosity, what country are you from? I'm shocked to hear that they turn skirt steak into ground beef. That seems like a waste to me (and seems like a job for something like chuck roast).
I think "eye of round" is the center part of the round/rump, as opposed to top or bottom round, but I'm not certain. And yes, it's a poor cut for steak. Probably okay for roasting if done properly, but I've never tried.
This is in Norway. And I am absolutely sure that it's not sold in supermarkets. Same with flank steak. When I asked a local butcher for it, I was told that they could have it ready for me in 3 days, which implies that the slaughterhouse (or whatever is their upstream is) don't even deliver that part of the animal to the butcher.
Sorry for the late response, but wow. You can't even get flank steak? That's hugely popular here now (US, Seattle specifically). I can find flank steak everywhere (and the price is way up from where it used to be).
That really interesting that you have to pre-order this. It's also interesting because it highlights that you actually have butchers. :) We have butchers in Seattle, of course, but most people get their meet from the supermarket now (in some parts of the country there are no standalone butchers anymore).
Most people do get their meat from supermarkets in Norway, but a lot of butchers have cleverly turned their stores into high-end gourmet delis. Gourmet sausages, cured/smoked meats, marinades, pre-marinated meat etc. are all in vogue. I guess people got tired of obsessing about coffee and making beer. You still have quite a lot of old-style, no-frills butchers, but they are almost invariably halal butchers that serve the relevant part of the immigration population.
Hrm? I have... there really is no difference. With PBR and other American Adjunct Beers ( http://beeradvocate.com/lists/style/38 ) It has little to to about taste and everything to do with not wanting to buy from the 3 industrial leaders that own 90% of the market.
West-coast guy here, I'd never heard of Yuengling till I visited Virginia Beach. And I'll agree, for a "swill" beer, that's some pretty good stuff you've got going on there!
Those beers may all hover around the same quality, but I don't think a blind taste test could work at all with those beers (one way or the other.) They are all rather distinct in their refreshing mediocrity (Coors is significantly more mild than PBR (hard to say if that is in a good way, or a bad way), and Rolling Rock has a distinct "corn" flavour.) Anyone who drinks a lot of those beers is going to be able to pick out which is which, at which point the taste test would no longer be blind.
I'm not sure how he means it, but it sounds like he means one that is optimal for drinking while mowing the grass (or which you might imagine someone drinking while mowing the grass.)
Mowing the grass is a hot activity, done in the sun (can't mow wet grass) so you want a light bodied beer that is best when frigid (Guinness is out). There is also probably some notion of mowing your own grass being something that you don't do if you can afford to pay a neighborhood kid or landscaping company to do it for you, so cheap beers are picked. You probably shouldn't get absolutely sloshed while mowing the lawn either so that excludes a lot of choices as well.
Basically a shitty, cheap, refreshing, and ubiquitous beer.
You'll hear a similar term from cigar smokers: "yard gar", a cigar that's cheap so if you drop it (or it suffers other insults) while working in the yard it's no big loss.
I think a lot of this is also economic. Many other types of food (beef, chicken, pork, fish) soon became heavily industrialized, with semi-mechanized processes capable of harvesting food in bulk. Things like trawler nets or meatpacking assembly lines. Lobster remains fairly labor-intensive to harvest, with lobstermen needing to check individual pots and bring up lobsters one-by-one. That means the price of other meats has come down much more quickly than the price of lobster.
BTW, during the financial crisis, a collapse in demand and a bumper crop of lobsters drove the price way down. In late 2008 you could pick up $2 lobsters in supermarkets in Massachusetts. My family ate a lot of lobster for those few months...
There is another piece here which deals with Lobsters being a particular toxic dish as they are the dumpsters of the ocean: scavenging dead material. One might not hurt, but weeks on the stuff would leave you quite sick.
That is what I have heard (sorry can't remember the source). But they basically sift through the garbage and refuse all their lives. That is why allergy to shellfish can be common and those allergies tend to be severe.
This isn't a strong argument on its own... liver and kidneys "sift through garbage" constantly but how many people are allergic to chicken or cow liver or kidney?
It's not explicitly mentioned in the Torah why shellfish are not kosher. Seems to be tradition rather than anything rational. Camels and pigs are no more toxic to eat than cows.
Pigs and humans can share a wide variety of parasites, intestinal worms etc. Even now, you're advised not to cook pork rare (as opposed to, say, a beef fillet 'en-bleu').
Why on earth would one keep a pig to eat refuse when you aren't going to eat the pig? You can't milk 'em, they don't lay eggs, and they generate a lot of additional waste.
The lobster is killed quickly with a knife in their main nerve cluster (the article calls it the brain, but I think that's giving it too much credit). Time is then provided for the muscles to stop seizing, and it is brined to improve texture and to prevent coagulation of the hemolymph to the meat. Then the lobster is divided and different parts are cooked for different times just like we commonly do for most other kinds of meat.
I thought HN might be interested, since many of us are incorrigible optimizers.
That sounds like far too much work than the current process. I doubt any lobster eaters would jump through all those hoops when simply boiling them works so well.
Well, it's an animal rights kind of deal. If you're the kind of person who cares about that, this might make or break a decision to prepare lobster for dinner. If (like me) you don't actually care, then it's not relevant.
In the case of lobster, I wonder if the issue was taste or freshness. If they "washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles", it's easy to imagine that people were eating not-so-fresh seafood and getting sick, giving it a bad reputation.
The same thing happened to salmon in Sweden in the early 1800:s. There are stories about servants having contracts about not eating it too ofter as well, but the level of truth in these is questionable.
Either way, salmon was very abundant and became expensive/exclusive. It is getting cheaper again lately, though.
I'm not sure this is fair—doesn't the author admit that the value of the good is based on scarcity? That it became valuable when it could be shipped to places that didn't have two foot tall piles of lobster washing up on the beach?
What the author is pointing out is how the social perspective is completely arbitrary, even when it tracks the economic value. Of course lobster will be cheaper / less valuable where it is more plentiful, but it was also viewed as intrinsically worse than other foods, in stark contrast to its popularity today.
What the author fails to point out is that eating seafood every day sucks. It's too rich/sweet/salty. It's like eating cake for every meal. It's not that people are fickle or stupid or whatever he's trying to point out here. No one wants to eat lobster every day. Not even people in the midwest. Ohh, and to add to that, eating a lot of shellfish can cause you to become allergic to it.
Source: I come from a coastal town and love crab, but couldn't eat it more than one or two times a week.
Fish is too rich? I thought that the consensus was that it is appealing because it is a lighter and healthier alternative to meats such as beef, chicken and pork.
Many fish are. Shellfish even more so. Nobody who can help it relies entirely on seafood. Where I'm from, it was the poor children of fishermen who were stuck eating seafood every single day.
Sure, maybe the class-based issues made it less likely that people would be willing to try even lobster done right, but I don't think lobster as it was once served would have much more success today.