The Year of the Lobster

I didn’t ask for a lobster, but it came anyway.In April 2020, I started buying from Four Star Seafood and Provisions, a San Francisco restaurant supplier that had resorted to selling pristine seafood, meat, produce, and fancy pantry items directly to consumers—at reasonably dear prices, with a modest additional fee for regional delivery. Four Star sources both locally (little fishing operations, small family farms, artisanal producers) and from international distributors (hence, kampachi from New Zealand). You can order semi-boneless Wolfe Ranch quail, Alaskan halibut cheeks, farmed branzino from Turkey, razor clams, ramps, foraged sea beans, pistachio flour, Humphry Slocombe black sesame ice cream, date vinegar, and a $1,250 jamón Ibérico (which I imagine is a joke). And you can do it while dozing through a Zoom in your home office. You can spend $200 before you get out of bed, just as you impulse-buy running shoes, patio furniture, vintage vinyl, cannabis gummies, and upholstery cleaner. And when the box arrives, lowered onto your stoop by a friendly gentleman who leaves his van running, you say an exuberant thanks. If a swell of guilt accompanies your slightly conspicuous consumption, maybe you mention the tip you added to the order via PayPal.On May 3rd, 2020, I was waiting on a whole pastured chicken, frozen sushi-grade albacore loin, Sonoma County sausages, fiddlehead ferns, English peas, clementines, asparagus, a bottle of peppery Spanish olive oil, goat cheese from a Paso Robles creamery, and a few monkfish fillets. A, the Four Star founder with whom I’d previously communicated over email, sent an urgent message: the monkfish had missed its flight, and did I like lobster?Do I like lobster? Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I have never, uh, considered the lobster. And I have never been audacious enough to dislike something so precious and pure. Lobster is not truffle oil or jammy overpriced Zinfandel. Lobster is like good butter or a heavy tomato in September.And, as A added in a subsequent message, one was already on the way to replace the unobtainable monkfish: a one-pounder from Maine that I will resist giving a funny name. In this realm—an online marketplace with a well-designed interface—where one gets to fill a cart with the luxuries reflecting one’s momentary moods, culinary predilections, and seasonal cravings, I suddenly had no choice. But I did have a job. I was getting a lobster, and I would have it on May 3rd, because the lobster was arriving in an hour, alive, and it would need to be executed and cooked.For advice, I turned to my constant companion (my phone).Let’s get this out of the way before I move on to the rest—in which I describe its arrival and explain how I prepared it and say what it means to me in light of 2020’s all-you-can-cram trash buffet of disease, death, incompetence, racism, helplessness, anxiety, fascism, terrorism, loneliness, and stupidity. I am what annoying people would have once called a “foodie” (in slightly less awful times, when people devoted blog posts to litigating such labels), because I collect cookbooks, get excited about shopping at the farmer’s market, and wouldn’t live somewhere without good restaurants and grocery stores. I do not post heavily filtered pictures on Instagram of oysters and straw-colored Chablis (although I like those things). I am a securely employed public school teacher, a Bay Area homeowner, a white dad dude. I am aware that I was very lucky to spend 2020 thinking about what I was going to eat and not how.Thanks, I wrote A, bring on the lobster.The lobster came in a separate box from the fiddleheads and so forth, and perfectly, I did not see the creature until after I heard its alien clicks and exploratory scrapes, the sound of the blue-black carapace crackling against ice, plastic, and cardboard. I looked into the half-open box and the creature (I swear) stopped moving, looked at me, and tried to play it cool. It was smaller than I expected. I took the box upstairs. I dumped it on the counter and it briefly skated across a puddle of melted ice, but I grabbed it before it could tumble over the counter cliff down to the dirty wooden floor below. I crammed the lobster into the freezer for a brief sedation, clipped the yellow rubber bands from its now-still claws, steamed it until it turned red, inexpertly excavated a heaping handful of meat, made a fantastic salad with spring onions, lemon zest, and shaved asparagus, ate it with my family, and then felt happy but also sort of disgusted.This lobster-by-happenstance provided a fitting symbol for the listless decadence of the year, how my cooking and shopping habits responded to the challenge of feeling trapped (often) indoors with my family, disinclined to visit stores, and frayed and unstable across the days and weeks and months during which nothing fundamentally seemed to change. Maniacs hoarded toilet paper and soap, but a lobster fell into my lap during the worst year of very many people’s lives. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Four Star: it’s a noble enterprise; it treats workers well; through imagination and flexibility, it has survived the restaurant industry’s crushing economic predicament. There’s nothing (especially) wrong with me either: I save money without gasoline fill-ups and bar tabs and preschool tuition; instead, I pay for lobster I didn’t want; I tip well. But, as far as global catastrophes go, the experience for a lot of us is pretty cushy. As the world roils and people die, it’s easy (as a privileged American) to be full, tipsy, high, detached, sun-kissed, comfortable on a porch or fenced patio, exercising with apps, streaming endless moderately engaging entertainment on screens, and being constantly online enough to know, react to, and amplify every piece of devastating news within five minutes of it happening. That’s no less dystopian than a climate change apocalypse or a police force that kills non-white people with impunity and bullies journalists.In a personal state of chaos and confusion, a person also controls what can be controlled. I didn’t see a single student face to face for a whole year. My kid walked into a kindergarten classroom for the first time in April 2021. I struggle with insomnia most nights. When quarantine started, I began keeping a regularly updated Google Docs chart of the ingredients in our freezer, fridge, and pantry—with separate sections for meat, seafood, vegetables, cheese, carbohydrates, and what I unappealingly referred to as “seasoning agents.” In a section of the chart, I wrote down ideas for dinners under subheadings for different cuisines and categories of dishes: “Pizza,” “Burgers,” “Chinese,” “Italian,” and so on. When I cooked something, I deleted the ingredients used, moved the dish over to another part of the chart, and pressed command-shift-X to strike a line across the middle of the letters. Like this: lobster salad and focaccia with pesto and Comte.In 2019, I would have told a friend with this routine to find another hobby. In 2021, I recognize that my semi-obsessive documentation wasn’t about the clear-eyed business of avoiding waste (the very occasional package of expired chicken, the perpetual bag of rotting herbs in the back of the crisper). I couldn’t control my child’s isolation and tears, but I could make chicken nuggets with panko and honey dipping sauce and teach her how to stuff giant pasta shells with ricotta and squash. I seemingly could not extricate myself from arguments with my spouse, one cost of living in a loft with an open-floor plan, but I could ask her what she wanted to eat. And I could make it, thanks in part to Four Star: Japanese chicken curry, mapo tofu, breadcrumb-topped roast squid, braised salmon bellies.By March 2021, I was vaccinated, going shopping more than once a week, still planning new Four Star orders but never quite clicking all the way through. When I looked at the Google Docs chart and, starting from the bottom, scrolled up through the 13 pages of crossed-out meals in 11-point font, I could note that I very obviously tried to make something new every single day. I rarely repeated dishes, and when I did they were meditations on broad themes: flatbread with shaved country ham and mushrooms one week, pizza with anchovies, frying peppers, and fontina the next. I made a lot of stir-fries but always changed something: a sauce, a combination of vegetables, an herb or spice. There was a stretch of grim farmer’s market veggie boxes; even in the bountiful heart of summer, heaps of bitter dandelion greens, mustard, and chard necessitated many “green” variations on gyoza, lasagne, and savory phyllo pie. I didn’t (and couldn’t) cook truly ambitiously, but I planned meals, noting in my calendar that I had to, say, marinate ribs on a Sunday if I wanted to cook them on a Monday or Tuesday. Within half an hour of being awake, I always thought about dinner. It was what I could control.So I’m giving it up again, slowly, awkwardly. I’ve been teaching on a campus and don’t have as much time for meal prep (which you can do between Zooms when you’re at home). To make evenings less hectic, I’ve decided to make a few dinners a week fend-for-yourself affairs, which my daughter enjoys because she knows it means a plain, lightly toasted quesadilla or microwaved leftover spaghetti with butter—filling, beige-white fare devoid of greenery, texture, or intense flavors. Whatever (as she’s now learned to say). In April 2021, I stopped updating the chart altogether, but I still return to it to remind myself of what I’ve forgotten I’ve cooked.It’s right there, near the bottom. I followed a series of easy-to-follow steps. I ended a lobster’s life and smashed its armor to shore up my own. I only cooked lobster once, on May 3rd, 2020. And I haven’t forgotten that I made it, but I also haven’t thought for a single second about ever cooking it again

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