Demise of Grocery-store Lobsters

"Unceremoniously, Whole Foods Markets, the largest natural-foods chain in the world, pulled its lobsters from their tanks last week and boiled them all. For the influential grocer, it was the final lobsterbake," writes Patrik Jonsson, masterfully, in an article in today's Christian Science Monitor.

Who ate them all? He doesn't say.

Jonsson goes on to quote me:

Where'd I come from?

"This is the end of an era, because the lobster is pretty much the last significant animal that [individuals] still have to kill [themselves] before [they] eat it," says Trevor Corson, author of THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS. . . . "I have a serious problem with anyone who's ever had a hamburger complaining about lobsters," Mr. Corson says. "The scientists who study lobsters all take them home and eat them."

What's more, Corson says, Whole Foods is failing to capitalize on one of its missions: connecting consumers to producers. Several Maine lobstermen are now printing their websites on lobsters' claw bands, so that buyers can go online and read a bio of the fisherman who caught their dinner. Such an opportunity for fisherman-consumer bonding is now lost by a chain that purports to value that connection, says Corson. "Whatever moral benefit we get from not having to deal with lobsters in our kitchens, we lose a larger awareness of where our food comes from," he says.

You can learn more about the web-based lobster tracking program I was referring to at Lobster Tales.org. Individual items of seafood, especially fish, are notoriously difficult to track from sea to plate; for example, scientific tests conducted last year by the New York Times revealed that much of the salmon sold as "wild" in New York City was actually farmed. This lobster tracking program is a rare and welcome exception.