“There are places that have better lobsters, to begin with,” said William Atwood, a major Maine dealer, discussing the handling of lobster. Singling out Swan’s Island and the Cranberry Isles, he said, “People took care of them.” He spoke of how Swan’s Island’s Joyces “carred” lobster and said he’d asked them, “How come you guys keep your lobsters so good in cars, better than what the fishermen would have otherwise?”
Atwood is less impressed with the way some other fishermen who sell him lobster handle their product. And he’s not the only one. Lobster mortality, called “shrinkage” in the industry, happens each time lobster is handled on its way from the lobster trap to the diner’s plate. Neither the average person enjoying a lobster nor the fisherman who trapped it realizes how many sets of hands that lobster must pass through.
The answer, on average? Five.
The fisherman transfers the lobster he trapped from the tank in his boat to a crate. The person on the wharf who accepts that crate of lobster does so without going through it to take out weak or dead ones. The fisherman gets paid for a crate of live, healthy lobster — whether or not they are, in fact, alive and healthy. That’s the first step, and Atwood and John Petersdorf, Atwood’s second-in-command, agree that if lobstermen were to take any “weaks” or “deads” home with them instead of selling them, it would reduce shrinkage, or mortality. This would make the lobster more valuable, which would raise the boat or shore price paid to the fisherman. As it is today, dealers who buy lobster from fishermen and sell it to wholesalers have to accept an industry standard mortality loss of two to three percent, right at the dock.
When doing quality control for another dealer some time ago, Jonesport lobster broker Toni Lilienthal recalled having to pick up shedders using both hands because their shells were so soft. She said, “When we land 75 million lbs. and between five and ten million die, we’re doing something wrong. It should be required at the dock that they not accept anything so soft that it can’t take a band.”
Lilienthal, Atwood, Petersdorf and others advocate zero tolerance for weak and dead lobster all down the line. (We’re talking about shedders, or soft shell lobster here — shrinkage is less of a problem with hard shell lobster if it’s handled with some consideration.)
Which brings up another problem: the way fishermen handle the animal aboard the boat. Tossing a shedder is asking for trouble.
Jonesport poundkeeper Albert Carver once spoke of fishermen throwing a lobster and its “jibboom” — ordinarily an extension of a boat’s bowsprit, but in this case a term for the lobster’s sharp nose — poking a hole into another lobster, which makes the injured animal bleed to death.
In high shedder season at times as much as 70 percent of the catch is soft: what Petersdorf calls “hot potatoes.” And it’s not all a question of quality; it’s the sheer volume of landings. The live market can only handle so much. Canadian processors come to the rescue by buying this huge amount of fragile product, and then cooking and freezing it.
Without the processors, the live market would be overwhelmed, and everyone in the industry realizes this and is grateful. But Atwood, Petersdorf and others suggest that if processors were to refuse to accept lobster of a quality that has to be held with both hands — if they had a zero tolerance on mortality — that would, Petersdorf said, “Put pressure on us, the dealers, which would then, in turn, put pressure on the wharves, which would put pressure on the boats.”
The trick would be to convince the Canadian processors that it’s in their interest to demand zero mortality because they’d make more money. In fact, this thinking goes, everyone in the chain — fisherman, wharf or co-op, dealer, wholesaler, distributor, store or supermarket — would make more money, and the lobster too weak to take a band would have a chance to live another day, harden its shell and become a viable product.
Another practice that damages lobster, according to Petersdorf, is that of loading lobster two crates at a time with the hooks going through only one becket on each crate. When the crates come out of the water, they slide sideways and the animals go from one end of the crate to the other, crashing into each other. “Even we have battled with crew over the years on how to unload product in the house,” he admitted. “It is a battle.”
Atwood has an idea for reducing the problem of too much soft-shell lobster selling for too low a price to satisfy fishermen. “Too many lobsters; not enough price?” Atwood questioned, recalling last summer’s tie-up (WWF Sept. 07). “We’ll take the lower third of the state (Kittery to Casco Bay) and close that in July. We’ll close the mid-section (Brunswick to Rockland-Vinalhaven) in August. We’ll close the downeast section (Stonington to Eastport) in September.”
He explained, “So you’ve cut your supply down. When they go back to fish, you’ve got a lobster that is probably 75 percent shippable instead of 30, 40, or 50. There’s your price. It’s [due to] the demand. The quality of the lobster they’re going to get is higher, so you have more to ship, so you can afford to pay more. Think about that one,” he said, then added, “[The fishermen] want an eight-dollar lobster? They may have to take a month off.”
Atwood’s idea is not original. In 1956, Portland dealer William V. Benson suggested the same thing and was castigated by just about everyone for his “disservice” to the industry and for “sullying the reputation of the Maine lobster,” as quoted in The Great Lobster War, Ron Formisano’s fascinating account of the 1950s Portland lobster price-fixing trial. When told about Benson’s plan, Atwood suggested that perhaps it was an idea whose time had come. He explained that southwest Nova Scotia avoids the shedder mess by closing lobster fishing from June to the last week in November and said, “Maybe the people in Canada are telling us something, because they have a lot of our market. They hold their hard shells as long as they possibly can, which [means] more hardened new shells, less volume hitting the market all at once.” He added, “I would say that the fishermen have to take notice if they want more value for the lobster. Let the grapes go back overboard. It’s a quality issue for us who sell them.”