The New York Times has taken a look at Linda Bean’s fast growing, and sometimes controversial, role in the Maine lobster industry.
Her goal, she said, is to save Maine’s most iconic industry by ending its dependence on Canadian processors and, under her Linda Bean’s Perfect Maine label, to mass market Maine lobster the way Perdue does chicken.
MPBN had a report yesterday on the Calendar Island Lobster Company. The new company will be selling their lobsters with numbered claw bands that you can look up online to learn about the lobsterman who caught it.
Jordan says retail lobsters will be hand-selected for quality, and wear bands bearing a number code representing the fisherman who caught the crustacean. “So that if somebody in Dallas buys these lobsters, or somebody in Denver, they can type in the number code and go on to our Web site, so they can read about the lobsterman that actually caught their lobsters, learn a little about their lives and more about their product and everything and really know right where their lobster came from,” Jordan says.
Today’s Press Herald includes a detailed guide to nearly 40 apple varieties grown in Maine with brief tasting notes and some suggestions on which farms are growing them.
Also in today’s paper is an interview with raw food chef Lisa Marie Lindenschmidt and an article on how lobster is now showing up in discount stores.
Maine lobster has long been associated with white tablecloths and candlelight, but a South Portland-based dealer is putting its lobster where the customers are: in discount wholesale clubs and supermarket take-out aisles.
Public radio is on a roll when it comes to food reporting. In addition to the piece mentioned in the prior post there’s also a pair of audio articles that were aired today on disputes among lobstermen and on the confusing new wine tasting law.
Public radio is on a roll when it comes to food reporting. In addition to the piece mentioned in the prior post there’s also a pair of audio articles that were aired today on disputes among lobstermen and on the confusing new wine tasting law.
The Press Herald has published an interview with Allison Romeo for today’s ShopTalk column. Romeo works with her father, Richard Merrill, to run The Lobsterman’s Catch on Widgery Wharf which is owned by her grandfather, Leland Merrill.
Q: How old are your dad and grandfather?
A: My dad is 54. My grandfather is 85. He finally stopped lobstering, which he’d been doing since he was a child, three years ago. My dad has owned his own traps since he was 13. His grandfather, Stanley Cushing, was a lobsterman as well, from Cliff Island.
The feature article in today’s Food & Dining section takes a look at several initiatives ranging from lobster barbecue to lobster wine, to help out the Maine industry.
“We smoke our lobsters here, and they are really a great vessel for just about any kind of sauce, and we’re trying to bring some attention to that,” [chef/owner of Buck’s Naked BBQ] Caisse said. “We’ve got a lot of local lobster guys who come in here to eat, and we hear stuff, we know how hard they’re trying to sustain their living. So we want to help them by telling people that lobsters are for more than just a special occasion.”
According to an article in today’s Press Herald, clam flats in Maine are reopening as the red tide dissipates.
Though there are still areas that are off-limits to digging, enough flats reopened Friday to put hundreds of diggers back to work and ensure a healthy supply of locally harvested steamers and fried clams for the first time all summer, dealers said.
“We’re very excited,” said Dave Wilcox, owner of Ken’s Place in Scarborough, a busy destination for fried clams and steamers. “People have been calling and asking, ‘Are the flats open yet?'”
According to an article in today’s Press Herald Maine lobstermen are “talking about a possible work stoppage to start as soon as next week.”
Frustrated with prices that continue to sink because of weak demand, lobstermen said they might stay on shore temporarily in an effort to reduce supplies and make their catches more valuable.
Lobstermen have threatened such shutdowns, known as tie-ups, in the past, and some have organized small-scale tie-ups in recent years to protest low prices or reduce excess supplies. But the fishermen also are notoriously independent, and there has not been a large-scale tie-up in decades.
Red tide blooms in Maine are at record high levels. They are at 50-60 times the limit at which the state closes clam flats, according to an article in today’s Press Herald.
“With this (red tide), even a small number of clams would get people very sick and might actually be fatal if harvested from certain locations,” Anderson [a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts] said.
Tomalley, the green substance in lobsters, also is considered unsafe to eat because of red tide. Lobster meat and meat from scallops and from fish are not affected by the toxin.