The story has long been told that in colonial Massachusetts, lobster was so plentiful that it was considered a pauper's food and was fed to prisoners so often that they rioted in protest. It's a great story, and as a person who thinks lobster is overrated I have told it myself.
But it's not true. Boston.com's local history section Wickedpedia decided to be spoilsports and check into the historical sources on this. Did New England Prisoners Really Eat Lobster In Colonial Times? The mythbusting was straightforward: the story doesn't show up until the 1900s, and was as often about Maine as Massachusetts. But Maine was part of Massachusetts in the 1600 -1700s and didn't have much in the way of jails of its own. The bits of truth in the legend come from references to lobster being so common and easily caught, as far back as the 1620s. Yet this was a point of advertisement to those back in England, to encourage them to come.
Sandy Oliver, a food historian and writer based in Isleboro, Maine, shared our suspicions: “Who the hell is going to pick all the meat off the lobster to produce enough for a prison full of people?” (Ed. Good point.) ...Oliver did her own digging and found no contemporaneous references to New England prisoners eating lobster during the 17th or 18th centuries. And when the story did materialize in town histories later on, it wasn’t even initially about lobster. It was about salmon.
Sometimes almost word for word. Very suspicious.
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