Monday, August 6, 2012
I see this differently too, Red Lobster
Hmmm...this Maine fisherman says "I love lobster..." I can see why she'd "love" lobster if she sells it to good seafood restaurants, or Red Lobster. But you know- I find it hard to believe that someone who makes a living handling these Insects of the Sea really enjoys eating them.
Heck, I find it hard to believe she makes enough money to enjoy eating them.
Also, she says that people "can never get enough" lobster. Personally, I can take or leave lobster. Almost every good seafood restaurant I've been to also serves up high-quality steaks. I'd rather have a steak than a lobster any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Oh, sorry- I keep mentioning good seafood restaurants, and forgetting that the topic of this post is supposed to be Red Lobster.
And I'd like to know what kind of people "can't get enough lobster," since it's a damn expensive food item, not exactly something that those who are used to ordering off the Dollar Menu at McDonalds can afford to eat regularly. "Can't get enough" of it? Really?
"I see food differently." I get the play on words, but taken at face value this is actually very accurate. You see food as gigantic bugs which spend their entire, very short lives feeding along the muddy bottom of the ocean until, one day, they wander into one of your cages to be captured. Then they have their claws taped shut, or disabled by wooden pegs. Then they are flown to good seafood restaurants (or Red Lobster) to be dropped into a tank and gawked at until they are finally plucked out and tossed into a vat of boiling water. That's how you see this food. I see an overpriced insect and, again, a poor substitute for a good piece of beef.
Farmers see food differently, too- they see the work that goes into the planting, harvesting, etc. I get that this woman means "I see food differently" in exactly this way. But my guess is that most farmers can afford the food they are producing, and I doubt that's really true of lobster fishermen. Maybe I'm wrong. It's happened before.
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Funny. I know of people who remember a time when lobster was the mac-and-cheese of its day: a food only the poor ate. Most of the people who used to eat it all the time wished that they could afford real food like steak. What that means is that while Lobster Lady cannot afford to eat what she catches, her grandfather wished that he could have eaten something other than what he caught.
ReplyDeleteFrom the 1870s till about 1900, Oyster Bars were all the rage among the urban poor on the East Coast of the US- you could get a huge oyster stew for a few cents. Wealthy people would rarely patronize such places, which were usually crowded and not especially sanitary, not to mention those poor people hanging about eating their oyster stews....
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