Trevor Corson

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

Trevor Corson’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

So we can tell that they didn't really consider lobster very high-class food.

There's a lot of reports that in the early settler days, in fact, lobster was such a low-class meal that it would only be served to um prisoners, for example.

The big commodity in those days was fish.

I mean, codfish were the desirable commodity.

And there's a whole political economy of how codfish and the hunt for them changed the world.

So eating fish, getting codfish, eating them, that was the goal.

And lobsters was a sideshow to fish.

As soon as a lobster dies, a lot of the enzymes in its flesh, it's very different from a fish in certain ways, the enzymes in the in the flesh of a lobster start to break down the meat itself.

And so it just becomes mushy really quickly.

And then lobsters can also sometimes develop toxins if they sit around.

So that wasn't the thing that turned it into a a really extravagant kind of fancy meal the way we think of lobster today.

But not long after that, there was yet another new technological development, and that was the railroad arriving.

So they built finally railroad tracks into just the western edge of Maine around the eighteen seventies.

There's one story that the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, you know, very wealthy celebrity, was one of the first people who started to make lobster into something special when he

ordered a bunch for a dinner party in Colorado, you know, to get the live lobster all the way to Colorado for his dinner party was a sign of how powerful and wealthy he was at the ability to tap this technology of the railroad.

So that's when lobster's reputation started to shift.

And the aristocratic types who weren't so keen on all these immigrants showing up.

They started to uh look for opportunities to get out of the city, uh especially in the summer.

And that's when you had this wave of sort of privileged white rusticator types who started leaving and and going and experiencing the rural, rugged beauty of of Maine.

And that's when the idea of eating a fresh lobster right out of the hands of, you know, some some rugged individual.

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