No bugs for me thank you. Last night I had a can of seasoned Field Peas and snaps, long as those are obtainable there won't be any grass on my plate either. One thing about this mini depression we're in, I eat a lot less and notice a couple pounds gone, but I had to look for a long time. I guess it is a known fact all living things communicate with their species for sure. It's like certain plants grow much better when exposed to certain music in a green house. Speaking of Lobster I think the last time I had lobster was around the mid 70s. I preferred the Texas Steak House, now that was a place you could chow down for real.
Interesting that you wrote, “bugs”. The fact is, Lobsters are closely related to Cicadas, cockroaches and sand fleas which, are also enjoyed by some cultures.
Yeh, you could write a book titled "Who First Ate That?" I guess the universal answer would be "Someone who was really really really hungry." Any t-shirt saying "I survived the Fugu" should have "↑I'm With Stupid↑" on the back.
I wrote about it before but I remember when a couple of other guys and I were talking about the same thing. We were all voicing our speculations when one guy’s kid spoke up and said, “maybe people just watched what animals eat”. “Out of the mouths of babes”. One problem though. People are the #1 predator of lobsters. No other aquatic creature really messes with them with the possible exception of seals but even they only deal with them when there isn’t much else to choose from. So, for the lack of copying what something else grabbed to eat, it had to be abject hunger that made some guy fight with an exoskeletal finger amputating machine.
I've mentioned that we spent summer vacations camping outside of Ocean City, MD. We were mid-western folk who had never seen some of the random weird stuff you could pull out of the ocean...the variety is infinite. Every once in a while we would land one of these: They were commonly known as "Puffer fish." When you first pulled then out of the water they were in a normal state of being, like the pic on the left. When they hit the air they would immediately start to inflate, making this loud rasping puffing sound like a heavy smoker who had just run up a flight of stairs. We would immediately throw them back in the water because we thought it was some sort of "You'll never take me alive" tactic, and we did not want to get exploded fish guts all over ourselves. They would float for a few seconds then immediately deflate and swim off...the tactic worked! Maybe it makes them difficult to swallow...but they can only execute it in atmosphere. Then one day a local clued us in: not only are these are really good eatin', they are the easiest fish to clean you'll ever catch. You cut off the head, pull back the skin, and there's a large tubular piece of boneless meat that runs the length of its body laying on the back of the fish...once the skin is removed you just lift it off. They have large bucked teeth like a rabbit's. You have to be careful. I could not find a head-on pic, but this gives you the idea:
I generally agree with the kid, although I would not eat carrion. I've read that some of the colonial-era slaves were fed lobsters because they were plentiful, and--being biblically unclean--the settlers would not eat them.
From WIKI: USS Puffer (SS-268), a Gato-class submarine, was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the puffer.
My Father was a Radio Operator on a Gato class which is now berthed at the Manitowoc docks as a museum. I posted photos already. Electric boat and Manitowoc were identical except for which side the anchor was hung, due to the difference in direction of their launch slips, that is one of the major factors when Historians attempt to identify the Gato class from the Electric Boat built. They all had so many physical upgrades it became very hard to distinguish one from the other.
They were also fed to prisoners, and there are documents relating prison ship "riots" protesting being constantly fed lobster. They were considered trash fish by the Colonials.
Since we have strayed a bit from calamari but are still on seafood, here are a couple videos from my favorite YouTube channel on the subject:
I’ve cleaned hundred of pounds of squids. Make hundreds of gallons of marinara especially for calamari. I’ve seasoned, breaded and fried hundreds of pounds of the stuff and It’s still one of the least favorite foods I have eaten no matter how it’s prepared. As a young cook, I had a chef tell me that if I didn’t like something I prepared then chances are the guest won’t either. Taste everything. To that I replied, “Good !! Take calamari off the menu because no one will like it”.
The stuff I got last night is literally melt-in-your-mouth. But I've had chewy as well. I've wanted to make my own (I've been told the secret is to marinate it in milk to break down the toughness), but all I've found is a 2# frozen solid block. I don't want to take the risk of defrosting it, separating the rings, then refreezing it in portions and trusting that it's still safe.