a day ago
Are We Approaching Peak Lobster?
I recently spent two weeks in Maine, where I ate lobster, was asked if I wanted to eat more lobster (no!), slept on lobster sheets, watched lobstermen fish, judged otherwise fashionable women for their 'lobstah' sweaters, and even dropped a half-dozen live lobsters into a pot, causing their death. I was also reading Canadian journalist Greg Mercer's The Lobster Trap (Random House, Aug. 12), on the $7 billion lobster industry in the US and Canada.
When I recited facts from the book — becoming a Maine-splaining lobster windbag — the summer people and lobster enthusiasts I spoke to were often surprised, coming as we all were from a place of incuriosity. Part of this may be the timelessness of our impressions of lobsters: as a luxury food for special occasions, or to lure us to vacations in places where the beaches are rocky and the water is cold. But another reason for people's soft-shelled impressions on the state of the industry is what Mercer describes as its objectively mixed state: collapsed in some places and facing challenges from climate change, regulation and increased fishing; yet booming elsewhere on the back of high prices and Chinese demand.
