Lobsters were so abundant in the early days—residents in the Massachusetts Bay Colony found they washed up on the beach in two-foot-high piles—that people thought of them as trash food. It was fit only for the poor and served to servants or prisoners. In 1622, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford, was embarrassed to admit to newly arrived colonists that the only food they "could presente their friends with was a lobster … without bread or anyhting else but a cupp of fair water" (original spelling preserved). Later, rumor has it, some in Massachusetts revolted and the colony was forced to sign contracts promising that indentured servants wouldn’t be fed lobster more than three times a week.
“Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation,” wrote John J. Rowan in 1876. Lobster was an unfamiliar, vaguely disgusting bottom feeding ocean dweller that sort of did (and does) resemble an insect, its distant relative. The very word comes from the Old English loppe, which means spider. People did eat lobster, certainly, but not happily and not, usually, openly. Through the 1940s, for instance, American customers could buy lobster meat in cans (like spam or tuna), and it was a fairly low-priced can at that. In the 19th century, when consumers could buy Boston baked beans for 53 cents a pound, canned lobster sold for just 11 cents a pound. People fed lobster to their cats.
…the lobster’s fate took a lucky turn in the late 1800s. Railway managers discovered if they billed it as a delicacy, passengers who didn’t know of its disgusting reputation thought it was delicious. As the years went by, lobster started showing up in salad bars, and by the 1920s, it had become the food of choice for the world’s aristocrats. The lobster’s popularity took a dive during the Great Depression, once again becoming a food for the poor, but by the 1950s, it was back in vogue and had become the luxury food…
https://psmag.com/economics/how-lobster-got-fancy-59440