How the lobster clawed its way up

Someone told me that way back in the day lobster was once food only fit for prisoners. So I did a little searching, and sure enough, back in the 17th and 18th centuries along the eastern coast of the U.S, lobster was a junk food item fed to orphans, prisoners, widows and servants and it was "commonly found in the dinner troughs of pigs, cows, and goats. It was so commonly used as a food for servants and prisoners that Massachusetts passed a law forbidding its use more than twice a week....a daily lobster dinner was considered cruel and unusual punishment! People were downright ashamed to eat lobster. Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation, wrote American observer John Rowan in the mid-19th century." In one Massachusetts town, a group of indentured servants became so upset at their lobster-heavy diet that they took their masters to court and won a judgment protecting them from having to eat it more than three times a week. Some contemporary Canadians remember kids from poor towns, as late as the 1940s, trading lobster sandwiches for peanut butter and jelly in the school cafeteria. (I find this hilarious!) The reason for it's gross unpopularity is that it was so plentiful. But when uppity tourists travelled to these coastal towns, they wanted to eat seafood, and it became a hot commodity. The locals began cooking it up in various ways, and when these uppity tourists returned home, they wanted to be able to have lobster whenever they wanted. So the lobster industry exploded...and here we are today, where lobster is a treat, the demand for it ubelievable and we all pay a lot to have it. Oh to have grown up along the east coast at that time..mmm! This goes to show the huge affect of public demand...yes, businesses want to make money, BUT we fuel it. We can't rely on business to be ethical for us, unfortunately that doesn't work, so we, the public, must make our own ethical and sustainable choices, and demand that businesses do the same thing.