If you wanted to diss someone in the 1700s, try calling them a lobster.

Lobsters were often compared to insects, sometimes being referred to as the cockroach of the sea.

The word lobster might even trace back to the Old English word loppe, meaning spider.

Shellfish such as lobster, crabs, and even oysters were all once considered a poor man's food and were something only to be eaten out of desperation.

So how did some of the most disrespected creatures in the ocean become the ultimate symbol of luxury today?

It wasn't a straight climb, or claw, to the top.

It's more of a loop, with shellfish going from luxury to survival food and back again.

Long before lobster became a colonial insult or a food of desperation, it was considered a delicacy in ancient Rome.

Oysters were similarly prized and associated with wealth and access.

Writers like Pliny the Elder raved about oysters and other shellfish as luxury foods, saying "it is hardly possible to say enough about them, for they have held first rank as a table delicacy for a long time."

Romans would even import them from Britain and other parts of Europe.

In ancient China, oysters were also valued both as a food and for their medicinal properties.

By the 19th century, oysters were cheap, abundant, and sold on nearly every street corner in London.

They became a substitute for expensive beef, stretched into stews, soups and pies.

Oyster pie was a working class staple.

Shellfish started to become ordinary, and with that started to lose its power.

Abundance stripped shellfish of its status.

When European colonizers arrived in North America.

Lobsters were reportedly so abundant that they lined the coast in large piles.

Before colonization, indigenous communities across the Americas had already woven lobsters and oysters into their food systems, not only eating them but also using them as fertilizer for crops and as bait for fishing hooks.

For a long time, lobster and oysters existed in the same category: survival food.

Not luxury, not indulgence, just protein.

Shellfish wasn't fancy anymore.

It was food you ate when you had few options.

But food doesn't stay devalued forever.

Especially not when large systems step in to control access.

During the Civil War, lobster canneries began popping up along the East Coast, turning lobster into an efficient shelf stable protein for soldiers.

Canning made lobster portable and profitable, and, paradoxically, that accessibility revealed its value.

As overfishing followed, supply dropped.

And scarcity is where luxury begins.

Infrastructure did the rest.

Around the same time, oysters were undergoing their own transformation.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, New York City was the oyster capital of the world.

Oysters were everywhere and served in stalls, taverns, and cellars across Manhattan.

They were cheap, fast, and deeply tied to urban life.

You could grab a plate of oysters the way you'd grab a sandwich today.

In the early 20th century, oysters moved indoors into tiled halls and grand dining rooms.

When New York City's Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, its oyster bar became a ritual stop for commuters who downed some oysters and martinis before catching the train home.

What had once been a street food became something curated, served cold, served fast, and served to people with somewhere to be.

As oysters grew in popularity, overharvesting reduced supply.

At the same time, urban pollution contaminated the water and decimated oyster beds, driving up the cost of oysters.

Lobster followed a similar arc.

As railroads expanded and tourism rose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lobsters started appearing on trains traveling through New England and along the east coast.

Wealthy urban travelers, unaware of lobsters low class stigma in coastal regions, judged it purely on taste.

They loved it.

Soon lobster was being shipped inland from coastal Maine to dining rooms hundreds of miles away.

Crabs, too, shifted from regional necessity along the Chesapeake to seasonal indulgence, especially as refrigeration and transport turned local seafood into national commodities.

By the late 1800s, lobster had fully crossed over from being a working class staple to a luxury food associated with wealth and status.

In New York City, a new kind of restaurant began appearing across Manhattan, the Lobster Palace.

These dining rooms were ornate spaces designed for high society diners and the rich and famous.

Here, lobster was no longer just food.

It became synonymous with luxury and indulgence.

These restaurants could charge premium prices precisely because their clientele had no relationship to lobster's past.

No association with poverty or desperation.

And once lobster became a marker of status, it raised a harder question.

Who actually benefited from its success?

As the shellfish industry expanded, its labor force became increasingly clear.

Incarcerated folks, black communities, child laborers, and migrant workers in coastal towns were the ones responsible for catching, shucking, packing, canning, and preparing shellfish.

These communities were often underpaid, unprotected, and almost never shared in the profits.

In the United States, Black watermen played a crucial role in shellfish harvesting along the Chesapeake Bay and other coastal regions.

Their labor shaped the industry even as they were pushed out of ownership, erased from historical records, and excluded from its financial rewards.

Many Black watermen were issued Seamen's Protection Certificates, which were documents that identified them as American citizens.

In a country that denied citizenship to most Black people, these certificates made them some of the first Black Americans legally recognized by the state.

They were often called Black jacks.

The certificates offered a rare form of mobility and protection, but only within the confines of labor.

Citizenship was granted not as a right, but as a result of usefulness.

African-American watermen like Frederick Jewett were foundational to how shellfish is still processed today.

Jewett developed the system for grading crab meat into categories.

His method is still used today, and remains the industry standard.

African-American communities built culture around shellfish and wore their relationship to the sea and shellfish as a badge of honor.

They passed on techniques, recipes, and rituals to cook things like crab legs, southern fried or char grilled oysters, and seafood gumbo.

At the same time that Black and immigrant laborers sustained the shellfish industry, in New England white entrepreneurs and restaurateurs built wealth and regional prestige around lobsters, crabs, and oysters.

Waterfronts transformed into destinations.

Working harbors became tourist economies.

The shellfish industry created massive profits for corporations and owners who were far removed from the labor itself.

Shellfish made places famous and put communities in the Hamptons, New Hampshire, Boston, Baltimore and Maine on the map.

But it didn't make the laborers wealthy.

Shellfish didn't just rise in value.

It rose on the backs of people who were never meant to benefit from it.

What started as survival food became a status symbol, while the labor behind it faded from view.

And maybe that's the real story on the plate.

So where does that leave us today?

Shellfish is still a status symbol, but it's a bit of a fragile one.

In 2026, lobster, oysters and crab are expensive.

Not just because they're rare, but because everything around them costs more.

Fuel, labor, transportation, tariffs.

The price on the plate now reflects an entire system under pressure.

On top of that, there's the immeasurable cost of climate change.

Even brands built on the promise of accessible luxury are struggling to survive.

Red Lobster, the chain that once made the lobster feel within reach, has spent the last few years closing locations, cutting menus and clawing its way out of bankruptcy.

Its leadership now admits the brand grew too large around a product that was never meant to be endless.

And the conditions that made oysters scarce in the first place haven't gone away, either.

Many oyster populations remain vulnerable, threatened by warming waters and pollution.

Which brings us back to the same question shellfish has always asked.

Because in the end, shellfish didn't change.

What changed was who had access and who didn't.

And that story keeps on repeating itself.

Today, some in the shellfish industry are trying to disrupt the cycle.

Sustainable oyster farming has emerged as one of the most environmentally responsible forms of seafood production, supporting ocean health without limiting access to seafood in the face of climate change.