Atlantic Lobster (Homarus americanus)

And now, it's time to get back to looking at foods. Now that I'm living in Boston again, I'm looking forward to possibly my very favorite food, the lobster. I can't remember when I had my first lobster but it's been my standard birthday fare for as long as I can remember.

History: Lobsters have been eaten long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, but were not really popularized until rapid transport enabled them to be distributed away from the northeast Atlantic coast alive. The center of the Atlantic lobster fishery remains Maine and the southeastern Canadian provinces.

What's Edible: anything that's not shell, including the tomalley (a greenish liver + pancreas combo organ) but this may harbor toxins just like any liver organ meat.

Byproducts While Alive: little lobsters, and shells during molting.

What Keeps Them Alive: cold water and the absence of cod. The collapse of the cod fishery is the reason why lobster populations have increased so dramatically in recent years.

Is it Ethical to Kill Them? I've always been told that lobsters are killed instantly by boiling water, as long as they're put in head-first. In 2006 a Norwegian food committee agreed that they were unlikely to suffer when put to death by this method, and that any convulsions were merely reflexive. However there are those who strongly disagree, and more recent research from this year indicates that crustaceans (hermit crabs) will change their behavior when subjected to painful shocks. Boiling a live lobster is in fact illegal in some places, such as Reggio Emilia, Italy. The most recent tool of deliverance is the Crustastun, which delivers an instantly lethal shock.

Are They Healthy? Lobster is a great source of protein, 60% of the daily value in a cup of meat. It also has abundant vitamin B12 (75%), copper (141%), and selenium (88%). I have been hearing some very interesting things about selenium and cancer prevention these past few weeks, and I'll write about this sometime soon.

For those who have a lobster allergy, the allergy is to a protein found in the muscle, not to iodine. The muscle protein is usually tropomyosin, and is present in all crustaceans, so sufferers are best avoiding shrimp and crab, also. Interestingly, dust mites also contain a lot of tropomyosin, and sensitization to dust mites has been associated with subsequent crustacean allergies.

Are They Sustainable? As mentioned, there seems to be an abundance of lobster recently, thought to be due to the depletion of cod stocks throughout the northern Atlantic waters. The problem is, while catches are very large, the overall status of lobster populations isn't well known, because they lives in nooks and crannies at the bottom of the ocean. Gauging a stock by the size of the catch isn't always wise, but that's what's done. For this reason, Seafood Watch gives Atlantic Lobsters a good alternative (yellow) rating, instead of the best choice rating.

Undeterred, the Maine Lobster Fishery is currently seeking Marine Stewardship Council certification. The process began in November 2008 and we should know a result by the end of this year/early 2010.

Bottom Line: I usually only eat it once a year but lobster is definitely my favorite! And soon it might be MSC certified.

Relevant Blog: Foodloverguy's Blog: I think this blog is sort of an offshoot of an online Maine lobster distributor, but it does have some good info on lobsters, including a bunch of recipes; they've been publishing for about a month.

References:
1. Wikipedia
2. Lobster nutrition facts
3. Seafood Watch Information Page
4. This lobster has the blues; image from Flickr Creative Commons

10. Are Prepared Foods Ever Healthier?

Besides the obvious example of avoiding infectious diseases by adequately cooking infected products (like pig meat) I have yet to discover a compelling example of a prepared or processed food that is in fact healthier than it's basic counterpart.

So I leave this as an open challenge - can you think of a prepared food that is clearly healthier than it's basic counterpart? If so please leave a comment!

9. Food Preparation Provides Jobs

It's a curious fact that transforming plant and animal matter into edible calories requires many, many people. It doesn't really make that much sense, biologically - after all most animals fend for themselves once they enter adulthood. But most humans have relied on producers and processors for some time. Once upon a time there were hunters and gatherers but there were also grain and root grinders, butchers, firetenders, servers, dish cleaners, midden managers etc. etc. etc.

So obviously there is an extensive network of food production, preparation, transportation, consumption, and disposal that has been in existence for thousands of years, paralleling the development of civilization. And this network has grown more and more complex as our food web has grown more complex.

Now, in America, fast food workers alone acount for some 1.7 million jobs, according to Parade Magazine. That does not include the dine-in restaurant industry, which tends to employ on a casual basis (i.e. doesn't tend to document employees). As our society moves towards a "service-oriented" society and away from manufacturing, as it has for the past 50 some years, more and more people are being employed by the food service industry.

So to say that one should avoid the processed food stream, produce one's own food, and buy the rest at coops or farmer's markets is not a zero impact statement. If the fast food industry collapsed many people who are surviving on marginal salaries would be thrust firmly into poverty.

Growing food, processing food, serving food - it's all hard work and not necessarily valued by society. Changing this would take a wholesale change in the priorities of our nation, which currently seem to be more along the lines of "cheaper better don't care 'bout nuthin' else."

Relevant Blog: Overtime Lawyer Blog: For some more thoughts about the plight of restaurant workers, from a legal perspective, take a look at this post.

Image of "Exploitation King" from Flickr Creative Commons.

8. Prepared Food is Cheap

I haven't updated my food energy costs in quite some time, but I've found it very interesting how widely variable the cost of foods per unit energy can be. Corn oil is as little as 0.04 cents per kcal, while organic raspberries can be more like 3.4 cents per kcal. That's an 85-fold difference in price. But unless you are going to live on oil and peanuts, whole basic foods are going to cost you at least 0.3 cents per kcal. (As an aside, this equals about $6 per day for a person eating a 2,000 kcal diet, or about $180 per month. Looking at my own budget, I think a more realistic cost with a focus on local and organic is 0.6 cents per kcal, a little less than $400 per person, per month).

Let's compare that to the Big Mac, which is actually used as a purchasing price parity (PPP) measure by the Economist. In July 2008 the Big Mac was reported to cost $3.57. Big Mac's weigh in at 540 kcal, so that gives you a cost of 0.66 cents per kcal. So living on Big Macs will actually cost you more than a basic food diet, about $400 per month.

So is prepared food cheap? Well yes, because a Big Mac is actually one of the more expensive types of prepared food, since it contains cattle meat. I can, right this minute, order a 24 pack of King Size Snickers for $29.99. Funny cooincidence, a King Size Snickers is also about 540 kcal (537 to be precise). Now we're at 0.23 cents per kcal. Not quite as cheap as plain old peanuts but consider all the steps going into making a Snickers bar.

Okay so I could keep going but actually the point should be clear - prepared food isn't really as cheap as you might think, but it's still really cheap. Some of the culprits like corn and soybean subsidies are well known, and the process of mass production of course reduces costs.

But the next time someone tells you that they eat at McDonald's because it's cheap, refer them to this post! And here's an article about how to select healthier (basic) foods on a budget.

Relevant Blog: Breaking Even: Nicole is trying to live on a $100 per month food budget, about 0.2 cents per kcal. And trying to make it as healthy/basic as possible. One clever thing she talks about in the linked post is chucking her freezer, which is a great way to avoid processed food and lose some weight in the process!

Price isn't everything - check out the customers; from Flickr Creative Commons

7. Prepared Food is Convenient

Over the last week or two, I've reviewed some of the reasons why I think we should all be eating more basic foods, as close to the ground and far from the petroleum foil as possible. But the vast majority of the products on the shelves these days, as I recently rediscovered (I have yet to find a great non-supermarket alternative in Boston) are processed, prepared, and packaged. There are some compelling reasons for this, other than the obvious padding of the processor's pockets.

If I interviewed 100 people who were disinclined to visit farmer's markets and/or purchase organic foods, I bet that 99 would admit to making their choices based on convenience and cost. Today I will look at convenience, and tomorrow cost.

When you think about it, the convenience of being able to tear a meal out of packet and consume it within 30 seconds is really an amazing thing. Probably no other development has contributed to the creation of civilization more. Can you imagine living like a bird, pecking one grain at a time out of a stalk of grass? Or how about like a hippo or rhino, who need to eat the majority of their waking hours just to stay alive. Or a cow, for that matter.

By removing the gathering and much of the preparation steps from the equation, food processors starting with grist millers to the current megas have changed us, arguably for the better.

So I'm definitely not advocating a return to threshing, husking, and grinding your own grain. Likewise it's nice for someone else to roast my coffee beans and even nicer when they grind them. But cooking from scratch i.e. basic food sources, is definitely one of my goals that is continuing to be a work in progress on and off-line.

Image of food preparation, the old fashioned way, from Flickr Creative Commons