As we continue our celebration of Maine’s 200th anniversary, today we are sharing the rags to riches history of lobsters! Lobsters are now considered a delicacy, but it wasn’t always that way. This lobster tale is all about supply, demand, and changing perceptions.
Early explorers to New England marveled that lobsters were so plentiful that they could be found in piles up to two feet high along the shoreline, and to catch them one simply had to reach into the water. However despite being so plentiful, the colonists viewed them as unfamiliar, disgusting, bottom feeding insects. Indeed, the name lobster comes from the Old English word, “loppe” which meant spider. Therefore, eating them was considered a last resort for the colonists.
In fact, in 1622 while facing starvation at Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford actually complained that “the best dish they could present their friends with was a lobster.” Another 17th century Englishman, William Wood, summed up the prevailing view of lobsters when he wrote, “Their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten [except by the Native Americans who] get many of them every day for to bait their hooks withal and to eat when they can get no bass.” Yes, because there were so many lobsters, Europeans didn’t want to eat them. Yet the Native Americans understood the value of lobsters. Not only did they use them as bait and their shells to fertilize their fields, they also ate the nutritious meat.
Despite the fact they were highly nutritious, plentiful and inexpensive, lobsters’ unappetizing reputation continued from the 1600s and well into the early 1800s. During that time it was common to see peddlers in Portland, Maine with wheelbarrows full of lobsters being sold to the working class. In fact some workers negotiated in their contracts that they would only be fed lobsters at most three times a week. There was even a court case in Massachusetts, where a group of indentured servants sued that they were being fed lobsters too often, and they won!
However, realizing that there was a market for this inexpensive food well beyond their shores, ambitious entrepreneurs in Maine, including the founders of B&M Baked Beans, opened canning factories to process lobster. With the fish industry booming and very profitable, canners first had to convince fishermen that it was worth their time to catch the often ignored resource. Next they had to persuade shop owners to sell their canned meat. Their gamble paid off though, and as acceptance grew for this inexpensive meat, canneries soon started shipping lobsters around the world. In fact, by 1870 1,200 lobstermen were providing 23 canneries in Maine with enough lobsters to produce two million cans per year!
As the 1800s progressed the owners of railroads and hotels also realized the value of serving this inexpensive meat to travelers who may not have been familiar with it’s poor reputation, and instead viewed it as an exotic treat. It didn’t take long for lobsters to gain a more favorable reputation. Thanks to canneries, railroads and tourism, the demand for lobsters increased beyond the shores of New England. Simultaneously, improvements in refrigeration allowed Maine fishermen to begin shipping live lobsters along the East Coast and as far inland as Chicago, St. Louis, and even overseas to England, where they sold for ten times the original price. Capitalizing on this demand, chefs in the finest restaurants began developing recipes for fresh lobster which quickly became the signature dish on many menus.
By the 1920s, the price for Maine lobsters reached an all time high. However, the demand for this luxury menu item soon leveled off with the Great Depression and by WWII lobster was once again mostly consumed as a cheap canned meat. Yet as with most natural resources, the demand began to outweigh the supply. The once prolific large lobsters used by the canneries became more difficult to find, and smaller lobsters were more expensive to process. Canneries began to close. Yet by the 1950s the popularity for fresh lobsters began increasing once again to the point that lobstermen were having difficulties keeping up with the demand. Thus leading to skyrocketing prices to meet the demand for this food that was once scoffed at for being too common and inexpensive. Although not nearly as plentiful as they once were, thanks to conservation efforts, Maine continues to be the largest lobster producing state in the nation.
To learn more about this interesting history of supply and demand we recommend, Collin Woodard’s The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (2004). For all things lobsters, please visit the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
