Into the pot you go: Maine restaurant sedates lobsters with marijuana smoke
Lobsters in one Maine restaurant go out in a blaze of glory once they hit the pot. The owner of a lobster joint is sedating her crustaceans with marijuana smoke before cooking them – granting them, she says, a blissfully humane death.
Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte's Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, told the Portland Press Herald that she had been looking for a way to reduce the suffering of her signature menu item. She experimented with blowing marijuana smoke into a tank with one lobster, Roscoe (basically, she hot-boxed him). When Gill then removed Roscoe's claw bands and returned him to a tank with the other lobsters, she says, he was less aggressive. Gill has a medical marijuana license.
She plans to offer this cooking method as an option for customers who want their lobsters to be baked before they're boiled. But that doesn't mean customers will get stoned from their dinner.
"THC breaks down completely by 392 degrees, therefore we will use both steam as well as a heat process that will expose the meat to 420-degree extended temperature, in order to ensure there is no possibility of carry-over effect," Gill told the Press Herald. So where some see a humane death for the lobster, others see a waste of perfectly good weed.
Related: Switzerland Bans Lobster Boiling Without Stunning or Killing Them
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday September 22 2018, @10:38PM (3 children)
Is there any particular reason why lobsters are kept alive after they've been caught? When I buy prawns they're frozen and usually cooked too.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @12:07AM (1 child)
I assume freshness and tradition. It is kind of odd because other shellfish like crabs are generally sold killed and cooked.
Also, lobsters are overrated, they're not really any better than crabs, but they're a lot more expensive. The only thing I can see is that the tail has a lot more meat in one place than what you'd see in a typical crab.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @12:13AM
King crab legs, bro. There's plenty of meat there.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23 2018, @12:11AM
Too many guts I think, for whole lobsters. On the other hand, you can easily find cooked and frozen lobster tails. That's pretty much all meat.