If you go into a seafood restaurant and order lobster, you know that it is more than likely going to hit you hard in the pocket. It is for that single reason that eating lobster is often reserved for a special occasion where you don’t mind pushing the boat out a bit.

However, rather surprisingly, this has not always been the case, as can be seen if you venture back into the earliest days of Colonial America. At that time, lobster was so plentiful that you wouldn’t just walk into a place that sold them and see a few in the tank with you then making your decision. Instead, they were so bountiful that they were actually fed to prisoners— which you would never imagine happening in the world today.

Just imagine the uproar if prisons around the world were feeding the inmates things such as lobster, and yet back in colonial times, it was seen as being nothing unusual. For us, eating lobster on a regular basis hardly sounds like a punishment, so it just shows how times have indeed changed so much.