When Lobster Was Spam: 5 Gourmet Foods That Used to be Cheap

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Lobster

It's no surprise that lobster didn't use to have much of a reputation. It is, literally, a sea insect. The lobster belongs to the same animal group as both the spider and the common bug, which should be your first clue. They were initially thought of as giant hassles that got in the way when fishermen were fishing for, you know, fish. You know in Forrest Gump when they first pulled up their nets and a bunch of junk fell out? The lobsters were the equivalent of that toilet seat.

The lobsters they presumably found crawling around the bottom of the fish bucket were originally what fishermen gave to their indentured servants to eat. People were so averse to eating it that they ground it up and used it as fertilizer, instead. Being seen as someone who had to eat lobster was something you generally didn't tell anyone until at least the third date.

British POWs during the Revolutionary War supposedly revolted over being fed too much lobster, after having apparently developed culinary Stockholm Syndrome from British food. Some states actually had laws against feeding lobster to inmates more then a few times a week, on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment, as it was seen as the equivalent of eating rats.

Then How Did it Get So Fancy?

Somebody went and invented the railroad. Soon, rich people from the middle of the country--who were painfully unaware of what was cool--were tricked into buying the sea insects. But after tasting them, they realized that they must have discovered the long lost gatekeeper for butter.

Ironically, lobster is now a commonly requested food for prisoners receiving a last meal before execution, where as back in the day who knows how many last meal requests were something to the effect of, "Anything but more freakin' lobster, ya cruel bastards!"

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Oysters

The oyster is a cousin of the snail, nature's glue stick. Oysters also hang out with, and look like, rocks; further proof that giving in to peer pressure is an important survival technique.

Furthermore, in the olden days, eating one required you to be really committed to the task of eating something that looked like a rock. If you succeeded in prying them off of rocks without just giving up and eating a baby, you still had to get that sucker open, because they have to be eaten when they're as close to alive as possible. This involves cracking open a shell that is the animal kingdom's equivalent of a medieval chastity belt.

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Foie Gras

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Polenta

Polenta is basically gruel, the food with the world's worst PR team.

But polenta is the gruel made from corn. Which meant that instead of looking forward to a case of the rickets and being forced to waste valuable calories on bursting into song, you instead got pellagra: a disease that takes something forgettable a like Niacin deficiency, and turns it into a disease that is also forgettable because it causes dementia... and death.

Much like gruel, working class families in Italy and Latin America largely depended on this corn mush, which can take an upwards of three hours to cook from scratch, has to be stirred constantly and tastes like something you'd feed to cattle.

"Polentoni" is actually an insult that means "polenta-eater" in Italian. While it's actually intended to describe Northern Italians as boring and flavorless, we suspect it's probably as a dig at the nasty skin condition they might have developed with their pellagra.

Have we mentioned pellagra also causes diarrhea?

It also steals your wallet!

Then How Did It Get So Fancy?

Celebrity chefs. Fairly recently, polenta went from being the dish that every rags-to-riches person thought they'd never have to eat again, to the dish that is costing them $25 in a restaurant run by the only person left on Earth not getting shit for wearing Crocs, Mario Batali.

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Sushi

The idea behind sushi is that you've got fish, plus stuff wrapped around it to preserve the fish. The fermentation of the rice kept the fish from giving you the types of illnesses you've only experienced through Oregon Trail. So originally sushi followed the formula of fish = "yum"; rice = "silica packet."

Back then the boozy, fermented rice was discarded, presumably because they were already pretty busy with all the opium. Then a 17th century Japanese doctor, Matsumoto Yoshiichi, hit upon the idea of adding vinegar to the rice to make it an edible part of the dish. This would be like if someone decided that a jar of pickle slices was now a soup.

Like most Japanese things, Sushi eventually became pocket sized. Sushi's portability, cheapness, as well as the allure of eating both a food and its wrapper at the same time turned sushi into the hot dog of the Japanese Edo period. The popular Sushi street stalls were the original fast food joints..

Then How Did It Get So Fancy?

Post-WWII, sushi arrived in the U.S. with the word "exotic" attached to it, which means Americans treated sushi the way that hipsters with asymmetrical haircuts treat anime.

Now there are sushi restaurants that charge up to $400 a meal (before booze) with a straight face. Masaharu Morimoto, best known for being the Iron Chef that makes Bobby Flay look like Richie Cunningham, writes in his cookbooks about the short, specific time limits he has eating pieces of sushi.

This seems reasonable until you remember that this is like a century from now reading a celebrity chef talking about how he can only eat his Chicken McNuggets exactly 236 seconds after they've left the fryer.

Lola subsists on a diet of flavored lip gloss and old pets, and she snarks football over at QuarterRack.

Next, check out the poor man's booze that will become tomorrow's new rich fad, in Nectar of the Broke: The World's 5 Worst Ways To Get Drunk. Or find out about some drinks that will never be sought out by the insanely wealthy, in Yogurt Pepsi: 14 Horrifying Soft Drinks Around the World.

And visit the rich man's Internet in our Top Picks section.