Why isn't lobster cheap?

"[T]he wholesale price of lobster has collapsed."

Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less....

Since most customers don’t know what’s been happening to the wholesale price of lobster, cutting the price could send the wrong signal: people might think your lobster is inferior to that of your competitors.... “A low price creates suspicion.” This helps explain one of the interesting strategies that restaurants have adopted to take advantage of the lower price for lobster: they keep the price of lobster entrées high, but add lower-priced items—lobster bisque, lobster mac-and-cheese, a lobster B.L.T—to the menu. That way, they can generate more business without endangering lobster’s exclusive image.

Lobster has also stayed expensive because it makes other menu items, particularly seafood dishes, look more reasonably priced.... So any restaurant that cuts lobster prices significantly runs the risk of making that sesame-crusted tuna look too pricey.

"Thank you for the 'crabs.'"

Via If You Can't Afford to Tip... You Can't Afford to Go Out and Eat.

Season 38 of "Girls" — when all the "girls" are over 60.

I wasn't going to watch this — I saw it linked yesterday — but Meade insisted it was excellent, and it really is — but if you don't know the 4 female characters from the show, you won't get how great it is. The actresses do a phenomenal job of adapting the 20-somethings to the over-60 milieu. [NSFW.]

"What’s interesting is that just because a food is delicious doesn’t necessarily make it popular."

"You enjoy it because, well, people around you seem to enjoy it. This means that items can also change contexts. This is what happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon, which went from a working-class Midwestern beer to Brooklyn’s preferred Hipster beverage. It’s also what happened to Marlboro, a poorly selling women’s cigarette ('Mild as May') before being rebranded to appeal to men. In both cases, nothing about the product itself changed. But if the peer behavior around the product changes, so too does our appreciation of it."

From an essay called "How Lobster Got Fancy/The surprising history—from food for the poor, servants, and prisoners to a soldier’s staple to everybody’s idea of a delicacy—of 'the cockroach of the ocean'" — via Metafilter — which first made me think why would anyone write an essay about lobster after there's already a greatest-essay-ever-written-level essay about lobster, which, by the way, the first-linked essay quotes — how could it not? — but doesn't link. But there's some good info and analysis about the culture of food:

During the Great Depression, impoverished families in Maine would sneak down to the ocean in the dark to empty and reset their lobster traps and take home the day’s haul to feed their families. It was still seen, at least in Maine, as a food for the poor. It was considered embarrassing for children to have to go to school with sandwiches made of lobster meat.

During World War II, however, lobster wasn’t rationed like other foods, and so people of all classes began to eat it enthusiastically, and discover its deliciousness.

Things that are delicious that you're nevertheless disgusted by. Is it because you're disgusted by other people? If you know that's your reason, do you overcome your disgust? If you do, is that because you're ashamed of yourself for looking down on other people or because you think that the food of the common people is usually pretty good and actually just what you're looking for?

But you still won't eat the cicadas, will you?

"The ten most overrated things in the world [SLIDESHOW]."

Let me guess. Is one of the things internet slideshows? Top 10 lists?

Noted author and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.

First sentence at the link. So much better than anything in the slide show that you've got to click through. I miss Christopher Hitchens. He wasn't overrated.

ADDED: After reading the comments (and writing some), I've gotten to the point where I can give the first 3 of my top 10 most overrated things in the world:

1. Sitting in an audience, listening/watching something on a stage/screen.
2. Working at some fucking job.
3. Bruce Springsteen.