DailyDirt: Lobsters -- Sea Food Different

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Lobsters have an interesting culinary history. While these invertebrates are now generally considered an expensive meal for special occasions, they were once so plentiful in the northeastern US that they were a cheap food fed to prisoners -- and subsequently considered "cruel and unusual punishment" to be served as a daily meal. (Perhaps they just didn't have much melted butter in the 1800s...) But lobsters have re-gained their status as a luxury food item, and here are just a few interesting stories about these critters.

• An approximately 80-year-old lobster, named Larry and weighing 17 pounds, was saved from a fate of boiling water and butter by Don MacKenzie and released into the Long Island Sound. Larry's age was only approximate, but based on how many times he had molted, he's between 70-100 years old -- and probably wouldn't have been a very tasty meal anyway. [url]
• Getting lobster meat out of its shell can be messy, unless you use about 87,000 pounds of water pressure. Forget your nutcrackers. A water-filled pressure chamber humanely kills lobsters instantly and can cleanly separate every morsel of lobster meat from its shell. [url]
• Over the last few years, a bunch of strangely-colored lobsters have been caught. Blue lobsters, orange lobsters, white lobsters -- and even lobsters that are half one color and half another -- have been turning up more frequently. But they all still turn red after they're cooked, except for the white ones.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: food, invertebrates, lobsters, molting, pressure chamber