Today at a good restaurant, you are going to pony up at minimum $100 for a lobster dinner. Too bad you didn't live in the 1800s.
Lobsters were once seen as bottom-tier food, especially in colonial America. Back in the 1600s and 1700s, they were so plentiful along the Northeast coast'piles of them washing up after storms'that people called them the "cockroaches of the sea."
They were dirt-cheap and fed to the lowest rungs of society: prisoners, indentured servants, and the poor. Some servants even had clauses in their contracts limiting how often they'd have to eat the stuff'three times a week was apparently too much.
The vibe flipped in the 19th century. Railroads started hauling live lobsters inland, and suddenly they became exotic for city folks who'd never seen them fresh. By the 1880s, fancy restaurants caught on, marketing them as a luxury. World War II shortages cemented the shift'canned lobster was not rationed, so it stayed a treat while meat was scarce.