We are not a culture who respects the aged. So one cannot expect much respect for the ancient. But what is the lobster if not ancient, nearly primordial, one might say. And you want to eat it. Eat it and not even admit that it is the melted butter that you’re after, not that rubbery piece of tail. Get your paws off them claws. Enough already!

Second cousin to the spider, lobster’s ancestry goes back 100 million years. Although nearly blind, the lobster has 10,000 eyes, hears with its legs, tastes with its toes and has teeth in its stomach. Just knowing these few facts should be sufficient for you to back off and give lobster a pass.

The Homarus americanus is found and fished off the Eastern coast of North America from North Carolina to Labrador. In 2008, about 85 million pounds of “bugs”, as Maine lobstermen call them, were hauled in. To meet high demand, most are caught during these summer months when they are not at there tastiest.

Lusty literary luminaries like the ribald Rabelais and insatiable Casanova promoted the esculent crustacean as a love food. It wasn’t, however, immediately taken to heart in the New World. Early Puritan settlers used the lobster as bait. Youngsters at the Plymouth Rock settlement were said to wade into the shallows and catch them with their hands. So plentiful was the lobster in those days that a hard storm would cast so many on shore, they were considered a nuisance.

Commercial lobster fishing began in the early 19th century. A fledgling industry grew up along costal Cape Cod around Provincetown and the Elizabeth Islands near Martha’s Vineyard. One of the earliest shipments of Main lobsters to Boston Harbor was in 1841; thirty-five thousand three-pound lobsters found eager buyers. Two years later, the first canned lobster meat became available — a one-pound can (meat from a 3 ½ pound lobster) was yours for a nickel! In 1885, 130 million pounds of lobsters were harvested.

Delivering lobster from the sea to the table is as difficult today as it was so long ago. Lobsters are trapped in “pots” set and hauled up (often by hand) in all kinds of weather. As arduous as is the lobsterman’s task, it doesn’t compare with the lobsters own struggle for survival.

Eighty percent of all lobsters die, or are eaten, before a few weeks of life have passed. A female lobster, depending n her size, produces anywhere from 6,000 to an astonishing 90,000 eggs which, until birth, she protects with her life. After that it is a lobster eat lobster existence. The one-third of an inch newborn lobsterling has a one in a million chance of survival. Strong currents, lack of food and falling prey to their mother, siblings or other predators all thin out their numbers. They soon make their way to the ocean floor and seek a hiding place. Over the next twelve months they will molt seven times. Every time they “dance” out of their shell to accommodate their increased size they become vulnerable until the new shell hardens. The good news is that chances of survival are then 10,000 to one.

A nocturnal feeder, the Lobster will eat practically anything on the ocean floor, but not without discretion. They only resort to scavenging and cannibalism under duress. They hunt by stealth and, like dogs, will bury anything they cannot immediately consume. Territorial and not social by nature, the lobster will not shy away from a fight. Bested in a battle, the lobster will often shuck a leg or claw to escape and in short order grow a new one.

Still see no reason to give them a break?

It takes six to eight years for a lobster to reach the pound and quarter size we gawk at in the lobster tank. Eight years for your eight minutes of pleasure. They can be, however, long lived growing to legendary size. In 1935 a forty-seven pounder was brought in off the Virginia Capes. In the Boston Museum of Science resides the shell of a forty-two pound seven-ounce monster. In 1974, “Big George” was brought in off Cape Cod— four feet, top to tail and estimated to be a hundred years old.

Lookat the lobster’s magnificent architecture. It is a brilliantly conceived work of the art, of plated mail, of exoskeletal armor. So curiously beautiful is the lobster, one of the few creatures we eat in its undeconstructed state, that Salvador Dali immortalized it again and again. As a child, the high profile surrealist wanted to be a chef and thus food plays a significant role in his life and work. Casting his lot with Casanova and other true believers in lobster’s prurient potential, Dali put the lobster to his best (or best known) effort, the Aphrodisiac Telephone(1936). About it, Nancy Frazier wrote in, Gastronomica*, “…it is truly perverse to combine a familiar object designed for personal communication with a fearsome-looking, aggressive creature.” She goes on to state, “Symbolically, the lobster might represent an aphrodisiac, a castrating father, a cannibalistic woman, or something else.” Something else, indeed. Where is Freud when you need him?

Dali was not alone in his veneration for the amorous arthropod. The lobster is the odd intruder in Delacroix’s, Still Life with Lobsters (1827). What are they doing there in that traditional get up of game? Well, the French romantic painter did say, “The first virtue of painting is to be a feast for the eyes.” Such feasts were often created by the masterful 17th century Dutch painters include, Still Life with Lobster and Fruit by Abraham van Beyeren, and the disturbingly, disorderly, highly symbolic, Still Life with Lobster by Willem Claesz. It just isn’t right to take that little wooden hammer and claw-crackers to a work of art now is it?

You could also just wait and let nature cut you off. A recent New York Times article, Endangered Species on Connecticut Coast: Last of the Lobstermen, (27/6/2010), speculates on the end of lobster fishing once a proposed five-year moratorium is approved on Atlantic Coast lobster fishing south of Cape Cod. Here’s you’re chance to be ahead of the curve for once.

This ought to be enough. Show a little respect.

* Gastronomica, Fall 2009, Vol. 9, No. 4, Pages 16–20 ,

Edward Bottone, a food and lifestyle journalist, is Chef/Instructor in the Culinary Arts program at Drexel University and has been a radio talk show host and TV presenter, and is also a food stylist and photographer.

Article photo from benny_lin via Flickr (Creative Commons), recipe photos from epicurious.com "The Cantankerous Cook" photograph from Hulton Archive/Getty Images, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.