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I was recently fortunate enough to spend a holiday on Prince Edward Island. You may know this Canadian province as the home of Anne of Green Gables.

Prince Edward Island is famous for its lobster suppers, which consist of a lobster, fresh baked buns, and a dollop each of potato salad and coleslaw. Every community, from Tignish in the west, to Souris in the east has at least one hall where you can enjoy a genuine island lobster supper.

I went to St. Margaret's, which is a tiny community in the eastern part of the island, where the lobster supper was held in a church hall. The local priest had been concerned that there was no local employment for the community's women, and so had put the church hall to use, serving up lobster suppers to hoards of hungry tourists like me, and providing jobs to the local women who would otherwise be unemployed.

The food of course was delicious, and when the meal was complete I took my dessert - a large portion of homemade strawberry shortcake bathed in whipped cream - out into the yard to enjoy the evening breeze.

I sat down at an old cedar picnic table, and was soon joined by an ancient weathered islander who sat across from me, and set about filling his pipe.

Not used to silence, at least with strangers, I made some remark about how good the lobster had been.

The old man looked up sharply at that, and informed me that he would never partake of one. They were scavengers, he advised me, that would eat anything dead they could sink their claws into.

And then he said something I could not believe.

"We used to plow 'em under as fertilizer," he said, gesturing at me with his pipe. "The fields would be red with 'em. That's what we knew. If you saw a pile of lobster shells outside a house, you knew they were having hard times inside it."

He took a long draw on his pipe then exhaled. "Poor food for poor folk."

My new friend went on to explain that in those days the lobsters were larger, and far more plentiful. There was such an abundance of lobsters that potatoes were valued more highly, and the red carapaces of untold millions of lobsters were plowed under the island's red soil.

I understood then how lobsters had become a rich man's delicacy. We value scarcity above anything else; we want what others cannot have. There is no special quality lobsters possess to please our palates, other than the fact that we've killed so many of them, that they are as rare now, as they once were abundant.

I wondered how many other members of our planet's natural world we would drive to the point of extinction, before finally learning to value.

Learn more about this author, David Riel.
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