06/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/14fUe3zDrhb/?mibextid=wwXIfr
When European settlers arrived in New England in the early 1600s, they found lobsters in numbers that were difficult to process.
The creatures washed ashore in piles, sometimes knee-high along the Massachusetts coastline. Children could fill buckets in an afternoon.
They were so abundant that colonists used them as crop fertilizer and ground bait. Eating one was not a pleasure. It was a sign that you had nothing better available.
Lobsters were fed to prisoners, servants, and the destitute. They acquired a genuine social stigma. The observer John Rowan described them in colonial records as signs of poverty and degradation.
The nickname that stuck was the cockroach of the sea. A creature that could grow to twenty pounds and live a century was treated as waste.
The transformation began in the 1840s, not only through marketing but through infrastructure. Railroad expansion connected the New England coast to inland cities for the first time.
Entrepreneurs developed smack boats, vessels with circulating seawater tanks that kept lobsters alive during transit, allowing them to arrive in New York and Boston still fresh.
City diners who had never encountered the crustacean had no inherited contempt for it.
