Join a discussion about topics in the Sunday Magazine

---

Search the Globe: Today Yesterday

---

Low-graphics version

From trap to table - continued

Locke grabs his fishing rod and casts. With a satisfied grunt, he hauls in a 40-inch striper. The sun is warm. The sky is clear. The sea is calm. The fish is large.

A good day to be in the Isles - if your name isn't Homer. He is yanked to the surface right after lunch. After extracting Homer from the trap and tossing him into the skiff, Foye heaves the trap overboard and hauls up another.

The Red Dawn chugs up to the Seaview Lobster Co. dock, in Kittery, a little past noon. A hoist lowers two lines to the boat. The lines are attached to one of the crates and pulled taut. For the second time in two hours, Homer rides skyward.

The trip is a short one. The crate lands on the back of a pickup truck. Fifty yards up the hill, the truck is unloaded and its cargo unpacked. Homer is weighed - 1.62 pounds of claw-clacking fury - and tossed into a tank where he will be warehoused for a minimum of 24 hours in 40-degree water, so he will purge himself of body wastes.

Tom Flanigan, Seaview's owner, writes up a bill of sale for Foye and pins it to his office wall: backward, as is customary, so other fishermen can't wander in and read the numbers.

Homer's voyage from trap to table has now completed its first leg. In the context of lobster commerce, however, the journey is just beginning.

No aspect of the modern lobstering business has changed as radically as the role of the middleman. Even the term is hard to define with precision. For among Maine's approximately 450 dealers and lobster-pound owners are shippers, truckers, dealers, and wholesalers of all sizes and descriptions.

There are fishermen who sell directly to restaurants, hotels, and fish stores, bypassing the middlemen altogether. There are co-ops selling to truckers, wholesalers dabbling in the retail trade, small dealers getting into export markets, and lobster pounds - often gated coves used as holding areas - which buy up stocks when supply is high and wait to sell them when lobsters are scarce and prices climb. (While lobsters can be kept alive almost indefinitely if properly cared for, dealers like Seaview seldom hold them for more than a week or two.)

Virtually every wholesale lobster business is a hybrid, industry veterans say, mixing and matching supply lines and outlets and competing in most instances, cooperating in others. Improved shipping methods and sophisticated marketing efforts serve to further drive an expanding and intensely competitive marketplace. Everyone takes his cut along the way, jacking up the per-pound price 15 to 50 cents per transaction. Conventional laws of economics sometimes apply and sometimes do not. In 1994, for instance, Maine's catch rose a whopping 11.4 million pounds. Average price per pound? It too rose, by 13 cents.

The choreography of lobster commerce is complicated by secrecy and suspicion, if not duplicity. Fishermen think dealers are out to take advantage of them. Dealers feel pinched between suppliers and distributors. Retailers and consumers wonder why lobster costs so much, and the government wants to save the whales.

``There's a myth that dealers like us make huge margins,'' concedes Tom Flanigan, the Seaview owner. ``Like any business, you can do OK if you stay with it. But you have to be competitive on both ends.'' Besides sales to restaurants, processors, and other wholesalers, 5 percent of Seaview's business is boutique mail order: live lobsters shipped to customers through catalog sales. The margins are high, Flanigan notes, but so are the risks of shipping live perishables.

Seaview sends an additional 25 percent of its lobsters overseas, and that market is booming. Live lobster exports jumped from 12.1 million pounds (worth $48 million) in 1990 to 30.8 million pounds (worth $136 million) in 1995. Besides Canada, the top overseas markets include Taiwan, France, Italy, and Japan.

Flanigan, 30, part of the new breed of aggressive entrepreneurs, joined a Maine Lobster Promotion Council trade mission to Japan in 1995. Asian importers are tough businessmen, he says. The Japanese, for instance, want hard-shell lobsters even when soft-shells are in season, and they will shop around aggressively to get them.

But Flanigan, like Foye, is also a throwback. The son of a Rye, New Hampshire, lobsterman, he grew up fishing before going off to college and then on to a brief career as an environmental consultant. Missing what he calls the ``allure'' of the fishing industry, he and his brother Kevin founded Seaview three years ago.

``Being young and optimistic, we took a Field of Dreams approach,'' says Flanigan. The brothers drew on their ties to local lobstermen to get the business up and running. Like a co-op, Seaview sells bait and fuel at nominal cost to men like Foye, agreeing to purchase whatever unsorted catch, or ``boat run,'' they bring in. In return, Seaview is guaranteed a dependable supply of local lobster when the fishing is good. In leaner times, Seaview turns to Canadian dealers and other suppliers. Holidays are especially busy times in the mail-order business, and Seaview cannot afford to get caught short.

A new facility capable of storing 40,000 pounds of lobster at a time, the centerpiece of Seaview's expansion plans, is under construction. More capacity means more potential markets to tap. Twenty years ago, few supermarkets sold live lobsters, and the air-freight business barely existed.

Homer? He is on another truck by week's end, destined for Chauncey Creek Lobster Pier, a few miles up the road in Kittery Point. ``Pick Your Own,'' reads the sign above his new, and very temporary, home.

At Chauncey Creek, many customers bring their own alcoholic beverages, appetizers, desserts, linens, silverware, and, when necessary, bug spray. Driving up from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, or south from Portland, they arrive at the restaurant lugging ice chests and champagne buckets, Ritz crackers, and creme brulee.

All come for pretty much the same thing: lobster, steamed in sea water and served with minimal fixings or fuss. ``People go without lobster all winter; it just seems more of a summer thing,'' says co-owner Jean Spinney, a cheerful Midwesterner who married into a Maine fishing family 20 years ago. ``It's messy, too. When they want lobster, they want to sit outside and get covered with juice and butter.''

Open from Mother's Day to Columbus Day, Chauncey Creek Lobster Pier is the type of seasonal eatery defined by its main menu item. Non-lobster offerings are few. Decorations lean heavily on the nets-and-buoys motif. The view of the estuary, back toward Pepperrell Cove, takes in a panorama of skiffs and traps.

For $7.99 to $9.99 per pound, plus a $1 ``cooking fee,'' diners can pluck a lobster from a tank and get it a few minutes later, served on a carboard platter. Other than eating at sea, it is hard to imagine a simpler way to consume a freshly cooked lobster.

In peak season, the restaurant serves 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of the delicacy per week. Particularly coveted are larger lobsters (2 to 4 pounds), says co-owner Ron Spinney. Maine is the only New England state to impose a ceiling on size (5 inches in body length) as well as a floor (3 inches), making oversized lobsters hard to come by. Most big lobsters eaten in Maine come from Canada.

Lobster connoisseurs also tend to prefer the hard-shell variety, notes Ron Spinney, who stocks as many as he can into the month of August, when the vast majority of the Maine catch is soft-shell. While considered as sweet and tender as hard-shells, if not more so, soft-shell lobsters are perceived as offering less meat for the money, since lobsters take time to grow into their new armature. Meat yield can be 15 to 20 percent of the total weight, compared to 25 percent for hard-shells. Susan Barber, of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council, says that presents a challenge. ``Nothing sells itself anymore, including lobster,'' she avers. ``Our job is to educate consumers not only about what to do with lobsters generally, but why soft-shells are just as desirable.''

Ron Spinney started lobstering when he was 11 (does this sound familiar?). His father and uncle ran Chauncey Creek, and he worked in electronics until he got laid off and returned to the family business. Jean and Ron Spinney bought the restaurant 14 years ago. Together they have steadily expanded it, relying on word of mouth to keep the tables filled. Balding and bearded, Ron Spinney looks like a refugee from a ZZ Top concert tour.

But Spinney knows his lobsters. If larger lobsters are cooked properly, he answers in reply to a common question, they taste sweet and tender, contrary to popular wisdom. ``After about 5 pounds, they get rubbery, though,'' he advises. Recommended cooking times are 16 minutes at a slow boil for a 1 pound lobster, 18 minutes for 1 pounds, and up to 26 minutes for jumbo size. Any lobster much heavier than 4 pounds could invite pickets, not picks.

The Maine lobster has recently become a favorite target of animal-rights activists. In 1995, a letter from actress Mary Tyler Moore about the pain that lobsters suffer during cooking was printed in a Rockland, Maine, newspaper. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a leading animal-rights group, has targeted Maine's annual August Lobster Festival for save-the-lobster demonstrations.

Barber concedes that she spends a good deal of her time - and the Maine Lobster Promotion Council's $300,000 annual budget - allaying concerns raised by PETA and its allies. During one radio debate with a PETA representative, she countered claims that lobsters scream when being cooked by pointing out that while lobsters do not possess vocal cords, ``They do have the IQ of grasshoppers.''

Jasper White, executive chef of Legal Sea Foods, is less guarded about the pure joy of eating lobster, PETA be damned. ``It is incredibly versatile, one of the world's great foods,'' gushes White, author of a forthcoming cookbook on the critter. ``If you only eat lobster occasionally, it's best to eat it plain. Steamed, that is, with lemon and drawn butter. But I cannot think of a cooking method that doesn't work for lobster.''

Which brings us to our main course.

Tail flapping and claws brandished, Homer - at least we think it's Homer - is plucked from his tank at Chauncey Creek by Jeffrey Hazen. Hazen, a mechanical engineer from Kittery, has come to the restaurant this extremely fine summer evening with his wife, a friend, and two young visitors from the Netherlands, Marije Schaafsma and Marjolein Hooyboer.

Schaafsma and Hooyboer have never seen a live lobster before, much less tasted the freshly cooked variety. Hazen is delighted to make the introduction. He pours a round of chardonnay and lights a pair of citronella candles. ``I make a good lobster in phyllo dough, with a nice cream sauce,'' he says. ``But that's for dinner parties. At home, we cook plain lobster, but it's actually cheaper to eat it here.''

A deer wanders out of the woods across the narrow estuary. Hazen orders steamed clams and tucks in a lobster bib. His companions do likewise. It occurs to one of the diners at the table that lobster is among the only foods with its own custom outerwear.

Dinner is served. Hazen digs into Homer with relish. Between bites, he offers advice in lobster-eating technique. Much is lost in the translation. Not Homer. In half an hour, he is reduced to a pile of empty shells. Hazen smacks his lips.

``So,'' he asks, ``what do you think?''

Schaafsma scowls and eyes her own plate warily. ``It tastes,'' she says, ``like fish smells.''

The moral of our lobster tale? If you're destined to be an epicurean memory, better a good one.