Location Taken: Baddeck, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012
As I was standing around waiting for my mom to get through the line at the grocery deli, I randomly started looking at things and ended up watching the lobsters moving around their tanks in the nearby seafood department.
After marveling at the size of their claws, and watching the way they moved around a bit, I got to thinking.
Why do we sell lobsters live? And for that matter, why don’t we sell anything else live?
Now, this is definitely an American tendency. I haven’t visited other countries enough to have notices the absence or presence of lobster tanks, but I have been in numerous Asian grocery stores. And if they have any live seafood, they have hordes of species all swimming around waiting to become dinner. I’m always amused by the crate of crabs at the one closest to my house. It’s literally that, a giant crate full of live blue crabs scuttling around on top of each other.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one or another escaped every so often. But still, I live in Maryland, prime crab country, and I have never seen live crabs sold at any standard American grocery stores. But every one has a lobster tank, despite the fact that the local waters contain no lobsters.
I did try to find out the reason we sell lobsters live (aka I did a ten-minute Google search), but didn’t find much. Though I did find out that lobsters were cheap food for the poor for a very long time, since they just literally washed up on the beaches in hordes in the areas you find them, such as, you know, the area Europeans started settling the Americas. It was the sort of meat you only ate because you didn’t have any other options. And then it became a fad in New York to eat them, and the prices shot up, and they’ve stayed up for over a hundred years.
But other than that fun tidbit, I couldn’t find out any rational behind lobsters being sold and cooked live. Well, there were a few mentions of the meat become tough if the lobster dies, and that bacteria gather in the dead meat, but honestly, that’s true of any meat. Perhaps not to the same degree, but still, we don’t have fish tanks or crab crates in our grocery stores, much less live chickens. We Americans tend to shy away from being reminded that our tasty burger once wandered around eating grass, and that means our meat tends to be sold fully cleaned and prepared and whatnot.
Who knows, maybe it’s because lobsters are essentially giant sea bugs, and we just don’t feel bad about killing giant bugs or something.
I guess it’ll just stay another mysterious cultural quirk or something. I certainly don’t know enough about lobster to have more than a basic clue. I don’t like the taste, I find it far too expensive, and to top it all off, I’m allergic to the durn things. Get a nasty headache whenever I eat some.
At least that makes it an easy allergy to avoid. Well, as long as I keep my fingers out of the lobster tanks.
