Cynthia Graber

speaker

308 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 9 Jun

Cynthia Graber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Gastropod · What the Shell? Cracking the Lobster's Mysteries · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

The meat was only good for a very, very short time.

So there was no real point catching lobsters because there was only a very local market for them until the second half of the eighteen hundreds when canning technology arrived in Maine.

Trains are a lot faster than horse-drawn carriages, and that meant you could take a live lobster out of the water in Maine, put it on ice, and it would stay alive for the whole trip.

Maybe as far as Chicago, but definitely all the way to Boston and even New York.

And then there was one more thing that changed the lobster's reputation.

And actually it's because people like my ancestors, new immigrants, started to show up in large numbers in New York City and Boston.

Eastern European Jews, Italians, the Irish.

Boom.

Lobster is suddenly the kind of food Trevor's great grandparents would enjoy while summering in Maine.

It's fancy food.

That story coming up after the break.

So by the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, lobsters had started to gain some cachet, and then their numbers exploded in the nineteen thirties and forties because we had totally decimated the cod population by that point.

So a lot of those fishermen who were not making a living off cod anymore because there weren't many left, they became lobstermen.

And lobstermen in Maine made a pretty good living throughout the twentieth century.

Rick says it used to be that Maine lobstermen caught twenty million pounds of lobster a year pretty consistently.

Suddenly lobstermen were catching a hundred and twenty million pounds, and that is worth about half a billion dollars.

And remember there were more lobstermen.

But even so, the lobster numbers just kept increasing.

Usually more pressure would lead to the stocks decreasing, but not for lobsters.

There's a number of things the fishermen do to protect the stocks, but still, the fact that the numbers seem to have grown so dramatically.

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