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“So much seafood was once dismissed as the debris of the sea: eels, snared from the Thames River in sixteenth-century England and tucked into pies in lieu of meat; clams, eaten by New England colonists only in times of desperation; oysters, offered all-you-can-eat for 6 cents at bars in nineteenth-century New York City; whelks, pickled and trundled by wheelbarrow through London streets, which in the mid-nineteenth century the British social reformer Henry Mayhew tallied “among the delicacies of the poor” and which housemaids wouldn’t eat in public, lest they be judged unladylike. Even lowlier were lobsters, scorned as indiscriminate bottom feeders, fobbed off on servants and put on prison menus, or else consigned to fertilizer. Their flesh and shells are still used in this way, as their high concentration of nitrogen and calcium helps plants grow.” — Sohla El-Waylly