LOBSTHER By Penel Norman
People always forget that the lobster is green. when it boils the astaxanthin is revealed, giving the food its iconic red. Grammy gave me a plastic bib as a kid when she served our Christmas dinner. On it, a scarlet decapod would crawl with its hand drawn legs given black limb borders (to show you where to pull the meat out.) I was told its poop was simply dirt, I was told its fear was simply nothing. I didn’t care, playing with the toys Grammy bought me. The difference between the male and female lobster is most notable in their tails, the females’ being curved and soft, the males’ being straight and strong. That’s what a cookbook from 1951 told me. It had a picture too, with bold, white lines. You are not supposed to keep your caught female, pregnant lobster. Loaded with eggs, she is meant to be marked and thrown back
into the opaque sea. She is not to be seen, let alone eaten. She who cannot be cooked without committing genocide, will remain green but underwater. Some lobsters, I read as a child at the aquarium, are blue, black, white or even yellow. One over 100 years old sat under a rock bored and sad to be viewed with bound claws. I asked “Why don’t we save it? Get the car and our big pot so we can make a jailbreak; it can live in my room or the bathtub!” Grammy laughed, ‘If we did that the other children couldn’t look at the lobster. That’s not nice, is it?’ When I stopped eating lobster I was considered very strange. I do not care, I choose to retreat towards my cave and enjoy the gift of unusual colours.
