Lobster was considered poor food until the mid-19th century.
The lobster is a crustacean of the Nephropidae family. As several other taxonomic families are referred to as “lobsters”, some people distinguish the Nephropidae as the family of clawed lobsters, emphasizing the distinctive and familiar physical characteristics associated with creatures in this family. Lobsters can be found in all the world’s oceans and are a valuable cash crop in many areas of the world.
While lobster is considered a delicacy today, it wasn’t always that way. Throughout the 19th century, lobster was the food of the poor and was often used as bait for more attractive species of shellfish. While it may seem ridiculous to lobster fans today, people in regions like Maine complain of being forced to eat lobster for weeks on end, with no culinary variation.
The lobster is an invertebrate, with a rigid exoskeleton that can vary in color from brown to greenish. The animals have long antennae and eyes on protruding stalks, along with five pairs of legs. The front legs developed into claws used for grasping and manipulating food. Some lobsters can develop claws of unequal size for specific tasks, and in case the larger claw is lost, the smaller claw can grow to fit the situation.
In the first five years of its life, a young lobster sheds its shell several times, in a process called molting. As the growth rate slows, so does the moult, until the lobster moults once a year. If left undisturbed, a lobster can live for more than 100 years and grow quite large, feeding on many small marine animals. Lobsters prefer the ocean floor, which means that most live on the continental shelf, because conditions on the abyssal plain are too harsh for lobsters.
Lobster farming is quite interesting. Many species of lobster reproduce while the female molts, and the male deposits a packet of sperm that the female can store for up to a year, until she feels ready to use it. When the female is ready to lay eggs, she forces the eggs through sperm to fertilize them and then attaches them to her tail, carrying them until they are almost ready to hatch. At the time of hatching, the eggs are released and left to drift, and the young lobsters live as drifting organisms until they are fully developed.