Every food writer wants to be the discoverer of the Next Big Thing. Oh, to have introduced the world to Ibérico ham or foraged morels! No one would believe you broke the news, but at least you could fume in private. I would like everyone to note, therefore, that I am writing about the Fourchu lobster before it becomes a megatrend. I'm not the first to enthuse about this creature — Peter Kaminsky penned an ode to the crustaceans in Departures magazine a couple of years ago. But Fourchu hasn't become a household name yet. And since I suspect it will soon, perhaps this is the time to look at how these things happen and why.
Like diamonds and Treasury bills, most foods have little inherent value. Some do: king crab is so dangerous to catch that there's an action-packed TV show about it. Alba truffles are exceedingly rare and difficult to find. But lobsters? Madison Avenue all the way. In a now celebrated 2002 essay, the late David Foster Wallace enjoined us to "consider the lobster." One thing we were invited to consider was how the animal had traveled, in a few decades, from being considered oceanic vermin akin to horseshoe crabs, a thing so low that it literally couldn't be fed to prisoners, to something that was, in Wallace's words, "posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down from caviar … the seafood equivalent to steak." Wallace felt bad for the creatures, what with them getting boiled alive and all, but took their status for granted. The only problem, of course, is that steak, like lobster, is no longer intrinsically valuable. Red Lobster is a chain restaurant so cheesy that people use it as a shorthand for low-end dining. ("My boyfriend is so cheap that he proposed to me at Red Lobster!") Lobsters, once luxe, verge on the déclassé.
One reason is that, unlike so many forms of marine life, lobsters are flourishing. A shortage in 2007 was followed by a glut the next year; if ocean life is on the wane, lobsters seem not to have gotten the memo. They scuttle around the floors of silent seas, consuming everything they come across, as immune to mankind as the household bugs they so resemble. So to continue to justify a high price in restaurants, a distinction is needed. And this is where Fourchu enters the picture. Fourchu is a tiny fishing village in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. There are only 47 residents, mostly fishermen and their families, many of whom have been there for generations. The waters off the island are some of the coldest anywhere on the Atlantic seaboard, and they produce a lobster of superlative flavor and texture.
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