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The Maine Lobster: A Not Entirely Authentic Cultural Symbol?
| Article
# : |
17678 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
3,881 Words |
| Author
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George H. Lewis
George H. Lewis is professor of sociology at the University of
the Pacific. He has a longstanding interest in popular culture
and has written extensively on the topic. |
To Americans, lobster means Maine. In image, homarus americanus is wedded to the state, as the following passage taken from a regional cookbook of the area written by Joy Deuland in the 1970s underscores: "It is…for the traveler who returns again and again to the rocky coast of Maine, charting his course by the aroma of freshly boiled lobster. His landmarks include the fancy seafood restaurants, the converted bait shacks where lobster rolls are served, and the picnic areas where a Yankee clambake can be found on a Sunday afternoon. His heart is unashamedly in his stomach, but let no one who has not dined upon the lobster make right of this passion."
Visitors to the state arrive eagerly looking for quaint fishing communities along the coast. They expect stylized lobster boats, wooden traps stacked high on rustic wharves, and lobster dinners consumed in sight of the famous rocky coast. What they are more apt to get, especially in the high summer season, is a bumper-to-bumper drive up U.S. 1, past fast-food stands, souvenir shops, and factory outlet stores. The lobster is there, all right, adorning roadside billboards and signs that advertise everything from shore diners to down-east craft fairs. But it is a different association and feeling than what was hoped for when the visitor rumbled over the bridge (and state line) from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Bill Bryson, in his The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America (1989), sums up this feeling of anticipation and letdown. "I drove and drove," he wrote, "thinking that any moment now I would encounter the fabled Maine of lobster pots and surf battered shores and lonely lighthouses standing on rocks of granite, but the towns I passed through were just messy and drear."
Messy and drear they may be, but they do push the lobster to the tourist with a passion. Trenton, Maine, (which bills itself as the cooked lobster capital of the world) has five lobster "pounds" that each sell an average of 32,725 lobster dinners in the three-month summer season, according to the local paper. Figured at 1.5 pounds per lobster, this totals nearly 250 tons of lobster consumed each summer in this one Maine town. (The restaurants also figure that they use two and one-half tons of butter and over three tons of coleslaw per season.) Selling lobsters to tourists in Maine is, clearly, big business.
The lobster as state bird
In a small state with few other economic resources, it seemed logical in the
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