Oh, the Horrible Things We Do to Lobsters

Today’s image is among the creepiest dining promotions in seacoast history. This Depression Era postcard depicts a lobster chef serving a huge lobster claw to a lobster dressed in a golfing outfit. The text reads “Lobsters *R* Good at the Rockingham.” Judging by the number of times this card appears in online auctions, it was a popular promotion for Portsmouth’s Rockingham Hotel throughout the 1930s and 1940s. 

Full disclosure, despite a lifetime spent as close to the seashore as possible, I have never eaten a lobster. Not one. I did work on a lobster boat out of Rye Harbor for two days in the 1970s, but our history ends there.

I’m pretty sure I was turned off to the consumption of large spidery crustaceans as a young child. I was terrified to find living creatures with huge claws thrashing around inside the refrigerator. Worse yet was watching them dropped live into giant pots of pointing water. The sounds they made were as horrifying as the smell. Then came the shell cracking and gooey buttery eating phase.

Thankfully, as my parents explained, eating lobsters was an adult thing. Kids could take a pass. I did and still do. According to Wikipedia, a lobster can live up to 50 years. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, a lobster weighing 44.5 pounds was caught off the coast of Nova Scotia. That’s more than I weighed when I took the lobster pledge. 

There’s nothing noble about my lobster stand. I boil live clams without a whiff of guilt.  But then I’ve never seen a clam try to crawl out of the refrigerator and across the kitchen floor. The question of whether lobsters feel pain is still being debated, but It’s it is now illegal to boil a live lobster in Switzerland and parts of Italy. While it takes a lobster two or three minutes to die in boiling water, it takes only seconds to electrocute them in a microwave-sized machine called a “Crustastun.” 

It’s hard to imagine the Portsmouth City Council adopting a similar ban. Beyond the seafood restaurant industry, lobsters are everywhere, from stuffed toys and lollipops to tea towels, t-shirts, and toilet paper. Grinning bug-eyed arthropods can be seen on cartoons and logos sipping beer, sunning on the beach, playing guitars, wearing clothes, making out, and shooting guns. All too often the artwork shows a grinning lobster seated in a pot of boiling water.

Truth be told, the Rockingham Hotel postcard is hard to ignore. But it’s success may have been tied to what was on the back. During hard times, the hotel offered a budget dinner menu. The $1.50 meal included steamed clams, a whole live lobster (boiled or broiled), french fries with green peas, Spanish salad with Rockingham dressing, ice cream and cake, plus tea or coffee.  I’ll take mine sans-bug.

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.