Category: Maine

What comes to mind when you think of lobster?  A rare treat or special event meal?   A delicacy?  Would you believe some cultures still consider lobster “the cockroach of the sea?”  There’s a scientific basis for that.  Neither fish nor mammal, lobsters are arthropods, closely related to the lowly insect.  Like the insect, lobsters belong to the invertebrate (lacking a backbone or spinal column) family. Today you have to pay dearly for an excellent lobster meal, but that hasn’t always been the case.  Lobsters were once so abundant that Native Peoples used them as fish bait and fertilizer.  According to early Colonists in the Plymouth, Massachusetts area, lobsters sometimes washed up on the beaches in piles two feet high.  It was hard to get gustatorily excited about something so common.  It’s conceivable that lobsters of exaggerated proportions may not only have been frightening, but tough to eat considering they supposedly grew to forty pounds or more. As such, in Colonial New England, they were considered poverty food and were served to servants, slaves, children and prisoners.  Children bringing lobster sandwiches to school were considered the poor kids (similar to the children who came to school with tortilla sandwiches instead of…

The late George Plimpton was a pioneering journalist who garnered much of his acclaim from competing in professional sporting events then recording the experience from an amateur’s standpoint.  From pitching against the National League prior to an All-Star baseball game to quarterbacking the Detroit Lions in an intrasquad scrimmage, Plimpton momentarily lived the dream of every would-be professional athlete. Today, it seems every network and cable channel has a competing reality show in which an unabashed combatant or group of contestants undertake unsavory jobs–such as bullfighter or oil driller–for which they are wholly unqualified.  The Discovery channel even has a show in which a poor sap “exposes the grimy underbelly of America’s dirtiest jobs.”  Participants in these reality shows run the gamut–from risking life and limb to almost certain humiliation. It came as no surprise when the Food Network announced its 2009 launch of its own job related reality show.  On “Will Work for Food” host Adam Gertler travels across the fruited plain trying out different jobs in the food industry for a day.  The show calls for him to do literally learn every job in the world of food.  The good-natured Gertler has had jobs in which he’s had…