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Lobster tasting good is a construct. 200 years ago lobster was the lowest peasant food that nobody with the money to buy other food would touch.
by dboreham 2y ago
Lobster tasting good is a construct. 200 years ago lobster was the lowest peasant food that nobody with the money to buy other food would touch.
- ziddoap 2y ago>Lobster tasting good is a construct. I'm not really sure what this even means. I enjoy the taste of lobster, and the fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't play any part in that.
- jamster02 2y agoThe fact that it is no longer peasant food doesn't consciously play any part in that.
- ziddoap 2y agoI ate lobster maybe 100+ times (and enjoyed it) before I learned that it used to be peasant food.
- suriya-ganesh 2y agoI think what the parent comment is saying is that, lobster was likely introduced as an elite/rare dish to people in the current century increasing the appeal
- cortesoft 2y agoThat is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food. I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.
- ziddoap 2y ago>that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food When I was a child, I didn't even know the word "delicacy" let alone have any concept of whether what I was eating was a delicacy or not.
- cortesoft 2y agoLike I said, I disagree with the person's overall thesis, just pointing out what they were trying to say.
- IOT_Apprentice 2y agoDoes that mean JD Vance will consume it? :)
- saghm 2y agoI think the point is that given the right social dynamics, some bugs that already are edible today could probably be considered fancy and tasty in a century or two. I might be the wrong person to ask though because I already find pretty much all seafood nauseating.
- saghm 2y agoAs usual, there's a (somewhat) related xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/1268/ https://xkcd.com/1268/
- tester457 2y agoTherefore with the right preparation some bugs might become delicacies.
- cortesoft 2y agoI think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used. Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.
- burnished 2y agoNo, we cooked it like shit. It gets rubbery and unpleasant real quick.
- maxerickson 2y agoIt was also wildly abundant.
- burkaman 2y agoI think this is sort of a myth. There was a relatively brief period of time in the US when lobster was considered poor people's food, but in the rest of the world and the rest of history it has generally been very popular and often associated with the upper class. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History I also think it's pretty common for historical "peasant" foods to be popular today, like tacos or potatoes for example. If anything, "poor people love it but rich people won't touch it" is probably evidence that the thing not tasting good is a social construct.
- conductr 2y agoPoor people have an incentive to find ways to make unwanted (aka cheap/available) food taste good, this simple fact is responsible for peasant food all over the world being generally amazing and why even a lot of upper class dishes have some origin as a lower class food. I’m in Texas and we’re pretty well known for brisket and fajitas which are sourced from fatty/undesirable cuts of beef.
- pfdietz 2y agoI've always been surprised how good the "bad" cuts become when cooked long and moist to convert the cartilage to gelatin.