Richard J. King - Lobster

The popularity of the Lobster extends far beyond the limits of our island, and he travels about to all parts of the known world, like an imprisoned spirit soldered up in an air-tight box.

W. B. Lord, 1867

I, for one, first came face to face with a live lobster at Main Line Seafood in suburban Ardmore, Pennsylvania. When I arrived on the first morning of my first summer job I thought the lobsters were staring at me from their tank. Their black eyes twitched and their antennae whiskered slowly but otherwise they sat menacingly still. They had piled on top of each other, backed into one corner in a rugby-style battle clump with their banded claws rested, in repose, yet seemingly eager to burst out and attack. The lobster tank had some algae growing on the glass, and I remember wondering if it would be more or less pathetic if we gave them some sand, a couple of rocks, maybe even a fake plant or two.

During my first summer I scrubbed fishcake pans most of the day but at the start of my second summer the owner promoted me to the counter. He prepared me for my new role by giving me a collared shirt and gripping my wrist to explain the most important thing for me to remember: Yes, maam! Just came in this morning.

At Main Line Seafood we sold live lobsters from the tank at the front window. We also sold canned lobster meat, plastic containers of fresh lobster meat, frozen lobster tails, and we offered lobster rolls to the lunch-time crowd, which amounted to toasting a hot dog bun and dumping in some lobster meat on lettuce leaves, while a bag of frozen potatoes sizzled in the deep fryer.

Kosti Ruohomaa, Maine Lobster, Monhegan Island, 1957, silver gelatin print.

Although the lobster species we sold, the American lobster (Homarus americanus), ranges naturally from North Carolina to Labrador, it was, and still is, primarily caught in traps by small collections of commercial fishermen along the coast and islands eastwards from New York City. The largest populations of these lobsters, and subsequently lobstermen, are off the Canadian Maritimes and the state of Maine. Offshore trawlers and trappers in the deep waters of the northwestern Atlantic dragged up lobsters from the bottom, and these creatures might have found their way into our tanks, cans and containers, too.

When I worked at Main Line Seafood in the late 1980s the lobster fishery in the Gulf of Maine and around the Maritimes was just beginning a period of massive growth after a relatively stable forty years or so. Since then landings have tripled in weight, with no sign of any significant abatement. James Acheson, a scholar of this industry, wrote:

The Maine lobster fishery is one of the worlds most successful fisheries. It is distinguished by a sense of stewardship, political support for conservation rules, and effective fisheries conservation legislation. In these respects, it is different from most other fisheries in the industrialized world.

Ranges of the seven most productive commercial lobster fisheries in 2008, from FAO statistics and L. B. Holthuis et al., 1991/2006. (Biologists have found J. edwardsii and novaehollandiae to be the same species genetically.)

I left Main Line Seafood after my second summer, heading off to university. Though my mother had occasionally ordered lobster for a special occasion while I was growing up, I never ordered this at restaurants myself because of disinterest (and the price). I didnt properly eat lobster meat until I was in my twenties when a friend invited me to his familys summer home in Maine. One foggy evening we ate fresh lobster on the dock. My friends family taught me the intricacies of how to eat the animal, such as how to suck the meat from the legs and how to find the orange unfertilized roe in the female. With fresh salted corn and cold bottled beer that lobster was sweet and had a perfect texture. The smell of butter blended with that of the low tide and the exposed, popping rockweed. Eating lobster is as much about the experience as it is the taste itself. We sat with our feet dangling over the water, flicking the shells back from where they came. John Steinbeck said it better in