The Lobster Economy, From Bait Fish to Luxury Food

In the early nineteenth century, lobster was poor people's food. Folklore says servants complained of being fed lobster too often, though historians have found no evidence of such contracts. Lobsters were so abundant along the Maine coast that they were often used as bait and fertilizer. The idea that this animal would become the signature luxury item of American fine dining would have been incomprehensible to anyone gathering them by hand from the rocks.

The transformation happened in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, when entrepreneurs began canning lobster meat and shipping it to Boston and New York. The canned product introduced urban consumers to the flavor. Demand grew. By the later nineteenth century, lobsters were being shipped live, in boats with open holding tanks and later on ice, to restaurants and hotels across the Northeast, and the price had begun its long climb from nuisance to delicacy.

Maine's lobster fishery today is among the most closely regulated in the United States, and that regulation is largely self-imposed by the fishermen themselves. The Maine Lobstermen's Association and the state's system of territorial fishing rights, informal but strictly enforced by the lobstering communities themselves, have prevented the overfishing that destroyed lobster stocks in other parts of the Atlantic. The measure of that success is visible in the numbers: Maine now lands the large majority of the American lobster catch, on the order of one hundred million pounds in good years, worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the dock.

Climate change is now the industry's most pressing challenge. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other ocean body on the planet, and the lobster range is shifting northward. The stocks that built the economy of the Maine coast for a hundred and fifty years are under a pressure no regulation can directly address. What happens to the fishery in the next generation is genuinely unknown, and the people pulling traps today know it.