Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Fruit Snacks, Waterbeds, and Lobster Tanks
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Go to rocketmoney.com slash decoder today. That's rocketmoney.com slash decoder. rocketmoney.com slash decoder. Steve Woods grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he has fond memories of a food he ate as often as oranges and string cheese. Fruit snacks. There were like a couple solid years, like maybe fourth, fifth grade,

where I had them with me every day. Fruit snacks are pouches of colorful little fruit-flavored drops that when Steve was growing up were made by a number of companies and shaped like everything from fruits to animals to Mickey Mouse and Scooby-Doo. The thing that most comes to mind is shark bites, which were the king of fruit snacks back in the day. Just when you thought it was safe to eat fruit snacks, here comes shark bites, a feeding frenzy of fruity fun.

The Great White was the biggest of the shark bites. So he was like the king, right? And then you had like the Mako and the Tiger Shark, and they all had different flavors. And like, I would take those shark bite fruit snacks and play with them. You know, they were kind of like a toy too, right? Shark bites have since been discontinued, but fruity bites in pouches have not. And Steve still buys them sometimes. Not as a toy, because they still seem wholesome to him. So like when I'm sick...

I might pick up some orange juice and some chicken noodle soup and also some fruit snacks because it's like they're tasty. They're an incentive to put something in my stomach. And there's vitamins in there, right? Like there's vitamin C in there, I think. I still have in my head like

oh, there's some value to this. Recently, though, Steve found himself re-evaluating fruit snacks. It was late one night after he'd put his own kid down to bed and he gave fruit snacks a cold, hard look. And what he realized rocked him. They're just gummy bears. So you're saying like up into your

You were just like, oh, these are like mildly healthful. And because you hadn't thought about it. And then you finally concentrated on them and you were like, it was candy. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's something that went on where these things could be marketed as not candy. And they ended up in the snack aisle and then they ended up in my lunch bag.

every day for two years, you know? That's weird. That's amazing to me. Steve was so taken by his fruit snack epiphany, he wrote us an email about it. I think I realized it was candy probably within days of writing it. And then I was just thinking about it solidly for two days. The more I think about the term fruit snack, the more it tickles me because, like, fruit is a snack.

You pack an apple in your lunch bag and you have a fruit snack. But they took this product, which is basically gummy bears, and then told us, no, this is a fruit snack. What's the story behind that? There must be some origin story for the fruit snack. Well, Steve's in luck. There is an origin story for the fruit snack. And we've got it.

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We get a lot of wonderful reader emails suggesting topics for the show. And at the end of the year, we try to answer some of them. It's our annual inbox episode. We're starting with a story about, yes, the dubiously named fruit snack. But we'll also take a look at perfume-drenched magazines, the singular plight of lobsters, and whatever happened to that horizontal liquid sensation, the waterbed.

Thank you for writing us with your questions. We've got answers after the break.

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Like our listener Steve, I snag a couple of soft, squishy fruit snacks whenever my kids have them because I find them delicious. And Steve is right. They do look a lot like gummy bears, which were invented in the early 1900s in Germany, one of many different candies that humans have made using fruit over the centuries.

But it turns out that despite fruit snacks' resemblance to gummy bears, they are more closely tied to another treat. Fruit Corners Fruit Roll-Ups are the chewy snacks made with real fruit that you unroll, peel, and chew. Steve ate Fruit Roll-Ups as a kid, and I did too. I'd rip that smooth sheet of red off its thin cling of plastic and wrap it around my index finger, turning the whole thing into a kind of chewy, damp lollipop.

Growing up in New York, I'd sometimes do this with a boutique product that called itself the original Fruit Roll. It was sold on specialty store counters and in Jewish delis. It came individually packaged in brightly printed cellophane with the brand name right on top. Jor-Rei.

And as we dove into Steve's question, I was delighted to learn that Jor-Re, my Proustian fruit roll-up, is a pivotal player in the rise of the fruit snack. And also that Jor-Re has a factory right in Brooklyn. And so Decoder and producer Max Friedman and I went for a visit. Hi, I'm Willa. Ray Shalhoub is the manufacturer of Jor-Re fruit rolls.

I've been doing this full time for

48 years. It has turned 70 last weekend. Ray welcomed us into the factory, which is on a quiet street not far from an expressway. It's flanked by a martial arts academy and a preschool. And if you walked by its blackened glass windows, you would never know that inside they're churning out 15,000 fruit rolls a day. Inside, it's an open warehouse with large packages of sugar, citric acid, and dried fruit in neatly stacked pallets on the ground. ♪

It's a cold process. We don't do any cooking. It preserves the integrity of the fruit. You get the good mouthfeel from it. The machines are custom-made in stainless steel, but they're also satisfyingly legible. Like, you can tell what they do just by looking at them. We grind the dried fruit up on the grinder there.

pump it in through here, gets metered out on a little cellophane conveyor. Each one efficiently grinds or mixes or flattens and then passes the fruit along to the next station on a conveyor belt. And then back here, the ladies on our custom rolling machines, they roll it by hand and then we get it packaged over here. Beginning to end, it takes about three days to make one piece.

The resulting confection, the Joray fruit roll, is sweet but tarter, rougher, and less processed than a regular supermarket fruit roll-up, even though Joray really did inspire them. The story goes like this. Ray's grandfather and great-grandfather, a Syrian immigrant, both owned sweet shops in New York City, where Ray's dad, Louis, worked as a kid. When Louis got back from the Korean War, he decided he didn't want to run a retail business himself.

There was a Middle Eastern treat called amardine. It was a dried apricot paste. It used to come in big sheets and rolls and you used to tear it off for a penny's worth. He got the idea of putting them in individual sheets. So one day he just closed the shop. He rented a basement down the block and he used to buy the apricots, grind it up and mix it with a little sugar and with the letter press, press it by hand. And my mother, while she was pregnant with me, used to hang it up on clotheslines to dry. And that's the way they started over there.

In 1960, Lewis sold his first Jor-Rei fruit roll, named for his sons Joe and Ray. Initially, the product was called shoe leather, then fruit leather, and the only flavor was apricot. Through the 60s and 70s, the company grew. Ray and his brother Joe joined the family business. And then they got some formidable competition. The big guys got into it. General Mills came out with the fruit roll-ups and just dominated the market there. Did you feel like they...

stole your stuff? I mean, stole is a strong word. They barred an idea, but they did it very well. I mean, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in sales still. You can feel them, you can pull them.

The General Mills version of the Fruit Roll debuted in 1979 as Fruit Roll-Ups. The company had already had enormous success turning something a little homespun and crunchy into a mainstream snack product when they transformed the hippie staple granola into Nature Valley granola bars. But Fruit Roll-Ups blew granola bars out of the water.

They were sweet and smooth, and their kid-centric commercials promised they were made with real fruit. I'm hungry!

Fruit roll-ups were an instant success, a modified Middle Eastern delicacy that became overnight a middle American sensation. And they did it by finding the sweet spot. They were healthy-seeming enough for parents and tasty enough for kids. Other companies started looking into what other squishy, gummy, fruity confections they might make, kicking off a kind of arms race in a new market category called fruit snacks.

In the 1980s and 90s, the term fruit snack did not describe any one type of product. It described any gummy fruit confection that basically wasn't marketed as candy. That included fruit roll-ups. But also, starting in 1985, little fruity pellets first brought to market as Sunkist Fun Fruits. Sunkist Fun Fruits. They're made with real grapes, oranges, cherries, and strawberries. Sunkist Fun Fruits.

Sunkist Fun Fruits were like a cross between a fruit roll-up and a gumdrop or a gummy bear. But Sunkist Fun Fruits, like fruit roll-ups, worked hard to avoid the candy connotations of those other treats. So did General Mills when they debuted their similarly shaped Fruit Wrinkles. Let me get wrinkles. Let me get loose. Fruit Wrinkles. Let me have that Fruit Wrinkles. Let me get wrinkles.

By 1988, these bite-sized treats had officially overtaken fruit rolls in popularity, even as the fruit snack category overall came to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the 90s dawned, these treats had so successfully convinced parents they were healthy enough to just toss into lunch, the company started to backburner their fruitiness and focus on appealing to kids with fun. Soon there were Gushers and Fruit by the Foot and Fruit String Thing and yes, Shark Bites. As the decade wore on, brand partnerships abounded. There were Garfield Fruit Snacks and Darkwing Duck Fruit Snacks.

and even NSYNC fruit snacks. And no, they did not actually look like any members of NSYNC. You couldn't bite off Justin Timberlake's bleached Bond curls, but one of them was shaped like a boombox.

Fruit Roll-Ups even made a series of commercials set among giant chemical vats, making the product appear more artificial than ever. It's new factory explosion Fruit Roll-Ups, a blast of fruity flavor, colors, and factory parts peel out. All of this created an opening for a company that might want to sell a more low-key, apparently fruit-forward treat.

Which is exactly what happened in 2001 when the grape growers cooperative Welch's licensed its name to a candy company that started making Welch's fruit snacks. They may have been late to the party, but Welch's fruit snacks have dominated ever since. So much so that when I hear the term fruit snacks now, they are the only thing that I think of. And not only do they have the promise of real fruit right there on their packaging, they're actually shaped like pieces of fruit.

So it makes sense that our listener Steve, like so many others, would have thought of fruit snacks as ambiently nutritious. Even if not so much. They claimed it was real fruit. Well, horse manure.

Steve Gardner is a public interest lawyer. It is not real fruit, and even its ingredients may have once started out as real fruit. By the time they got to be ingredients, they no longer were anything close to it. Steve's retired now, but he worked for years for the attorneys general of New York and Texas and at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, specializing in food fraud.

When it comes to food marketed to parents as healthy for their children, I do get really pissed off.

That was always my motivator as to what case we would bring is which one pissed me off the most. He sued the makers of many food and drink brands you've heard of, including 7-Up, Tropicana, Capri Sun, and most germinely for our purposes, the companies behind Fruit Roll-Ups and Fruit Snacks, which he admits do contain some fruit juice. The juices that it promotes are mostly what are called strip juices.

Strip juices are juices that have been stripped of pretty much all of their beneficial aspects. They're reduced from apple juice, which ain't all that good for you anyway, not much to it, to sugar water.

So fruit snacks are nutritionally pretty close to candy. The rub is that Steve says there is just about no judge who would stop a company from using the word fruit in a product name so long as it contains any small trace of fruit byproduct, including a stripped juice. This is why, to answer our listener's question, all these products can be sold and marketed like something better than candy.

But Steve also believes that when companies start claiming that their products contain, quote, real fruit, there's a case to be made that they've gone too far.

Broadly speaking, state consumer protection laws prohibit false, misleading or deceptive practices in any trade or commerce. Telling someone it's real fruit is both false and deceptive. And Steve has successfully made that case against companies like General Mills. Though even when he wins, the results can be unsatisfying.

In a settlement about only their strawberry fruit roll-ups, General Mills agreed to remove any images of strawberries from the packaging and to relabel only the strawberry ones with the actual percentage of real fruit they contained. But the company admitted no fault or intentional fraud and then it changed the product. Steve says that's typical of what's considered a victory in his line of work. I'm trying to think of an instance where a...

company that used to sell a product that was not fruity, was not healthy, was just junk, improved it. They usually would come out with a different product and pretend it was good. Steve has also sued the company that makes Welch's fruit snacks, though the case was dismissed.

Since then, they not only crow about real fruit, they boast of using whole fruit and they recently appointed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay as their CFO, or Chief Fruit Officer. All the fruits you see here, they're actually in the snacks. Welshies are made with whole fruit as the main ingredient. They are the real deal.

Meanwhile, on the quiet streets of Brooklyn, Joray Fruit Rolls have survived by not trying to compete with the big guys. There's machinery available now where you can mass produce this product. But what you have to do is, I like to say, dumb down the ingredients where you can't use actual dried fruit. And once you start doing that, you're producing the same product as the big guys, and you're never going to win that way. So even though we're limited with our production, we sell everything we make, we're happy.

When fruit roll-ups were introduced in the late 70s, Jouret lost a lot of supermarket accounts, and it wasn't clear they were going to make it through the 80s. But they had a loyal following among Middle Eastern stores, and they eventually gained a new and loyal customer base, kosher supermarkets. They sell 3 to 4 million fruit rolls a year now, in nine different flavors. Apricot, strawberry, raspberry, cherry, grape, fruit punch, sour apple, pineapple, and watermelon.

As our producer Max and I were leaving Joe Ray's Brooklyn factory, Ray gave us a box of different flavored fruit rolls. We immediately sat down outside right near the door to sample them for ourselves. Wow, they really taste exactly like I remember them. You want some? Yeah, sure. That one's good. Somehow we didn't get any apricots. Oh, really? We'll be right back.

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We're going to tackle another question now. This one comes from Alana Traven, a listener in New York who cares about aromas and always has. I have been searching for a Cygnus Rescent since 1986 when I was 13. I wanted to subtly define myself in a way that classmates would recognize I just left the room because they could still smell a trace of my perfume. She started with innocent smelling, easy-to-acquire drugstore perfumes. But then she leveled up.

I found out about high-end perfumes by reading magazines. It was so deeply exciting to flip the pages and find a perfume ad with a sample. The ad page was thicker stock. It had a flap along the side, and you could lift it up and release a whiff of perfume. These scented magazine pages seem to be everywhere in the 1980s, but they're not anymore. Which brings us to Alana's question.

Were these ad pages imbued with real perfume? And who came up with the marketing device? Did it boost sales? And when did they stop appearing in magazines?

Actually, I have a Vogue magazine from May 1986. This is intact. Should we look at it? Jessica Murphy researches, writes, and teaches about fragrance. They're usually called scent strips, the things that show up in magazines and also used to arrive in mail order catalogs. Yeah, I found three scent strips in this. That number of scent strips used to be par for the course. They were once cutting edge, at least compared to what came before.

There was this cliche that you'd walk past the perfume counter and some overzealous perfume sales associate would start spritzing you with perfume whether you wanted it or not. And this stereotype had existed for decades. In the 20th century, department store perfume counters were the primary place you could actually try on a perfume. But that began to change thanks to a technological breakthrough in, of all places, the cash register industry.

A research chemist at the National Cash Register Corporation was trying to make cash register tapes that could be changed without getting purple ink all over a clerk's fingers. So he came up with a process that produced tiny capsules of ink that were safely sealed within minuscule polymer bubbles so you could handle the tape and not get the ink all over yourself. And then about 20 years later, in the 1960s, a number of other

other companies discovered that this same process could be used in another way to encapsulate scent instead. They were...

I loved my scratch and sniff stickers. I had a whole collection of them.

It was actually while working on a scratch-and-sniff project in the 1970s that a big printing company made a big discovery. And they realized that if a couple sheets of the pre-coated scratch-and-sniff paper got stuck together...

When you pulled them apart, the scent was released without you having to manually scratch at it. So it's like the ripping and the opening that makes them smell more. Exactly. The ripping open of the scent strip breaks these microscopic encased molecules and releases the scent.

And so the scent strip was born. All sniff, no scratch. A number of perfume companies started experimenting with this new innovation. But it was a small company called Giorgio. Not to be confused with Giorgio Armani that demonstrated how powerful it could be. Giorgio was a boutique in Beverly Hills. They only sold their perfume at that boutique initially and through mail order.

So to find out what it was like, other than traveling to Beverly Hills, you would smell one of these things that came in the mail. And that inspired so many people to buy the perfume. The scents were astronomical for Georgiou, just due to the scent strip.

Between 1981, the year they started using scent strips, and 1983, Giorgio's sales jumped from $15 to $60 million. Other brands realize they can't afford to ignore the success of the scent strip that Giorgio has had. And then everyone is doing it. Do the scent strips smell exactly like the perfume?

We were told it was the same. I've always had a suspicion that they don't really convey the fragrance the same way you experience it in a liquid that you apply to your skin. But I think they're good for getting you into the proverbial ballpark. Like, is this something I'm absolutely going to hate? Or, you know, maybe this is something I should give a chance. Potential customers seemed to find them helpful too, and they became utterly ubiquitous.

It was said that Vogue only wanted to have three scent strips per issue to keep them feeling a little special, but other magazines might have four or five within a single issue. Scent strips had solved a long-standing consumer complaint. You no longer had to go to an apartment store to try on a perfume. You didn't have to leave the comfort of your home to get a spritz. But quickly, people started complaining about a new problem. Scent strips effectively spritzed your house.

They do emit an odor before you rip them open, right? They do. And there was a backlash. People were saying that sometimes they could smell it before they even opened their mailbox. And then you would go to the doctor's office and there would be magazines on the waiting table and you would smell those before you even picked them up and opened them up all the way. So it felt like there was no escape.

Magazines started accepting requests for scent strip-free issues. In 1992, the New Yorker announced they would no longer carry scent strips at all. Even so, it wasn't snobbery that really did the scent strip in. It was the decline of magazines in the 2010s. That's been the big change, right, is that there are far fewer magazines in general and fewer beauty magazines in print than there were 20 or even 10 years ago.

Scent strips still exist, but they and the magazines they appear in are less common than they used to be. Today, people who want to try on a perfume before they buy it are far more likely to order an online sample set than to come across a scent strip.

But that's not because they don't work. Ooh, let's try. All right, here's Mirabella. Jessica pulled out another magazine, a 1991 issue of Mirabella with a scent strip ad for the Estee Lauder perfume called Knowing. I have like a general sense of what this smells like. She ripped it open in front of me.

It still has a lot of fragrance. This is fascinating. And I'm actually amazed how beautiful this scent strip still smells. It's sort of a greenish, mossy floral with a little bit of rose, maybe. And you couldn't smell it just on the magazine anymore though, right? No, definitely not. Okay, good. So we just all had to leave our magazines in a corner of our house for 30 years. Wait a couple decades and they won't irritate you when you're sitting there in the living room.

Our next question comes from Sarah Fenton, a radio producer in St. Louis. I grew up in the 90s, and I remember some of my friends' parents, especially if they were maybe like single divorcees or had a lot of money, had waterbeds. You know, those groovy, sexy, swaying mattresses. I remember them being like a thing back then.

When I was a kid and how fun it was to sort of go and flop around and like blob around on a waterbed. And I just never see them anymore. And so I wonder, like, was this a maintenance problem? What happened to them? How did they get so popular in the first place? And do people still buy them? To answer Sarah's question, we thought we'd go to the source, the font, the spout.

to the inventor of the waterbed. Hi, Willa. As a kid, I was always making stuff, building stuff in my garage. In the late 1960s, Charlie Hall was living in the mecca of the counterculture, the epicenter of the sexual revolution, San Francisco. I lived in Haight-Ashbury right there before, during, and after the Summer of Love, and I saw it all and was part of it all.

But Charlie wasn't just a hippie. He was a graduate design student and his invention started as homework. He wanted to design something you could sit in comfortably for hours.

The first evolution was a gelo or gelatinous filled chair, very free form kind of frame and you'd sit down in it and it would gradually swallow you up. Was it like a blob? Contained blob, yes. That's kind of a good way to describe it. And in order to make it more viscous, I put in cooking starch, the kind of stuff you'd use to thicken a cherry pie.

As Charlie worked on this chair with the pie-like filling, he started thinking about another piece of furniture that really should feel as good as possible.

The thing you spend the most amount of time in is your bed. So why not have the most comfortable bed possible? Charlie was focused on reducing pressure points, the places where the blood flow to your back or your butt or your shoulder gets blocked and you toss or turn to release it. By now, he'd given up on the pie filling. It was more trouble than it was worth and decided that he could make do with just water. And so that's what he built for his next assignment, a truly forgiving life.

waterbed. The first night I slept on the bed, I found, well, gee, this is really, really comfortable. However, as it cools down after it was filled with warm water, it was not comfortable. So Charlie tweaked his prototype. He added a heating system for the water that plugged into the wall. But the whole thing was still really heavy.

Like 2,000 pounds heavy. My apartment, it was a pre-earthquake San Francisco Victorian. It listed a little bit to the right, if you looked at it from the front curb. But I think when I filled up my waterbed, it corrected the lean of the building.

Charlie's bed weighed way too much to bring into school. So he had his design classmates come over to his apartment to check out his therapeutic invention. There were some looks at it. They probably didn't accept the fact that it was going to be the most comfortable bed possible. And everybody said, well, this is weird. But as they looked at it more, they began to realize it might have some upsides.

other uses. Because it moved and it was warm and it was undulating and it was just kind of sensual. So they got wild ideas. This is going to be a fun product to sleep on or play on, either one. And someone went down and got a gallon of cheap wine and the party started.

Turns out that the summer of love and the dawn of the sexual revolution was a great time to have invented an undulating bed. Well, as some of the advertising went on waterbeds, it was like, waterbeds are good for two things and one of them is sleep.

Charlie started a waterbed business called Interspace Environments. They initially sold them out of San Francisco head shops before getting their own storefront downtown, selling to a famous clientele. Early purchasers were one of the Smothers brothers had a waterbed and also someone in the Jefferson Airplane, too. I remember it got hoisted up to their room. Was your sense that people were buying them because they were...

Sexy? Yes. Hugh Hefner put in an order for the Playboy Mansion, upholstered in green velvet, and competitors selling copycats sprung up all over the place. People who sleep on a Waterbed City waterbed sleep better than you do. And when you sleep better, it's written all over your face. Soon, waterbeds were catching on all over the country. So much so that they were even being lampooned on primetime series like The Carol Burnett Show.

Come on in. The water's fine. I'll just try the shallow end. And Charlie insists that the waterbed's rise wasn't just about sex or novelty. For some people, they really felt better than regular mattresses. If you went into a store, people would walk around, lie down on one, dare to be...

The big smile comes over the face of someone who lays down on a waterbed that's the right temperature and they sink into and it just feels more comfortable. By 1978, the New York Times reported that one out of five Californians was sleeping on a waterbed. By 1986, it was one out of every five Americans. And as waterbeds became more mainstream, so did the ad campaign selling them, which no longer talked about sex quite so much.

You'll sleep like a baby on a superior waterbed. For two decades, waterbeds were a serious player in the mattress market. But then our listener Sarah is right. That market sprung a leak.

And the waterbed craze deflated. The advent of things like memory foam started to emulate what waterbeds did. The whole direction in bedding changed after that to pillow tops, memory foam, all those things. And some mattresses come reasonably close to waterbed comfort without having water in them. These new mattresses were light and easy to move, and they could never leak. They took the key insight of the waterbed—

Comfort is king or queen or double or twin, but did it without the hassle. Waterbeds today only make up around 2% of mattress sales, and their legacy has largely become a punchline, some goofy relic of the past, sent up by Saturday Night Live. Splashing in the night, round me brings me rest. The ocean is my prayer. Our waterbeds are the best. Ha, ha, ha.

But Charlie thinks they deserve more respect. It certainly was not a fad. It lasted far too long for that and it made major influences on the industry. Waterbeds changed bedding in America. And what happened was people were no longer looking for firmer is better and coil count and all this goofy stuff. They were looking for the core reason you buy a mattress, comfort. And that's what people are still looking for.

And what Charlie's still getting from his own invention. I noticed the difference dramatically when I go back to sleep on a conventional mattress in a hotel or whatever. It just doesn't cut it. Water beds are more comfortable than any bed out there. I've got four of them. When we come back, we move from water beds to water tanks and the creatures who have to live in them.

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On to our next question. Hi, this is Melissa from Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico. My husband and I celebrated our 32nd anniversary in the Canadian Maritimes this year, where we had the best steamed seafood and lobster. Got me thinking about when grocery stores at home here in Mobile had tanks of live lobsters. Why are they the only thing sold alive in the grocery store?

Over the years, a lot of people, from David Foster Wallace to sketch comedy shows, have considered the lobster and observed how strangely we treat them. Who am I? And why am I condemned to boil alive when all that I have done is live my life? Whether it's the stockpot or at the grocery store, we treat this animal, of all animals, unlike any other.

How did that come to pass? I think it's strange, you know, because normally people don't want to see the food live that they're going to eat. Jan Whitaker has written about lobster tanks for her blog, Restauranting Through History. And she says the way we now treat lobsters was once how we treated a lot of animals we eat. Well, I mean, in the 19th century, I think people knew more about where the food came from. They were not so squeamish about killing animals because...

You know, even in cities, people would raise chickens and kill them and eat them. In the late 19th century, there was even a restaurant in Brooklyn where customers could go into the backyard, pick out a chicken and watch it get slaughtered. That wasn't a marketing device. It was just like, make sure that you're getting a good chicken instead of one that's got a disease or something.

Diners had pretty good reason to be mistrustful of restaurants and food purveyors more generally. Refrigeration and food preservation was rudimentary and food safety standards non-existent. Killing something yourself or watching someone else do it was a way to ensure it was fresh. I grew up hearing about older relatives who would buy a carp and keep it alive in the bathtub until they were ready to turn it into an appetizer.

And at a restaurant, customers really might want to see that their food was fresh because they were paying more for it, though not yet for lobsters. Most diners didn't even know what a lobster was. Instead, the sea creatures swimming around in swanky restaurants were fish and turtles. Turtle soup was a real delicacy.

Whereas lobsters were not. It wasn't really a big restaurant item in the 19th century. You know, lobsters were considered food.

Poor people's food, they were not the luxury thing that they later became. Infamously, and perhaps apocryphally, they were fed to people in penitentiaries. They were not rare or expensive, but abundant and cheap and extraordinarily regional. A staple of the North Atlantic, and really of Maine, which was and remains the hub of the lobster industry in America.

By 1880, lobsters canned in Maine were making it all the way out to California. And by the turn of the century, it was possible to transport some live lobsters across longer distances. And so a smattering of restaurants started putting them in tanks for the same reasons as the chickens and the fish and the turtles. To tell customers they should pay for the real thing.

But over the course of the 20th century, food safety and preservation techniques improved dramatically. Consumers no longer needed to see their food alive to know it was safe. And we came to accept, and in fact expect, that the animals we ate would come to us already dead. And those tanks of turtles started to disappear.

But lobster tanks did not. Instead, they went in the opposite direction. Red lobster is where America goes.

If you love seafood, this is the place. When the very first Red Lobster opened in 1968, they amazingly did not actually serve lobster. But soon enough, it was on the menu. By 1983, it was the largest table service restaurant chain in the country and placed prominently at every single location was a lobster tank serving as a show-stopping marketing technique.

a mini aquarium novelty that brought people in the door. Lobsters and tanks were also increasingly a showpiece in grocery stores across the country. And you could take their contents home and, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, try to boil them alive. Put it in the pot. I can't. I can't put it in the pot. I can't put a live thing in hot water. What do you think we're going to do, take it to the movies? Oh, good. I'll save you.

Lobsters were a kind of accessible luxury, available no matter where you lived, but still a little pricey and a little special. And in fact, as you can hear in that clip from Annie Hall, having to kill them yourselves is part of their specialness. They aren't like anything else. But why not?

If advanced food safety made it okay to eat already dead chickens and pigs, why do we still kill lobsters immediately before we consume them? The answer you hear from people is, if you don't, they just don't taste right.

They have to be eaten fresh, more or less. I mean, you know, you can have frozen lobster, but it's not as good. And if you want fresh lobster, you pretty much have to keep them alive until you eat them. This is the justification that undergirds our unique treatment of lobsters. If you want to eat a lobster correctly, there's no choice. But is that true? Do you have to eat them that way?

To answer this, I reached out to a man named Ben Sturgeon. Do people tell you all the time that you have the perfect name for your job? Occasionally, yeah, occasionally. And my mother's maiden name is Roach as well, which is another fish. Ben, a veterinarian, runs a UK nonprofit called Crustacean Compassion. And he's a big fan of lobsters and the larger group they belong to, Decapod Crustaceans.

Decapod basically just means crustaceans with arms. I love the strangeness that the decapods kind of bring to this world. You know, they really are the aliens of the deep sea, in my opinion. Ben's organization was started in 2016 by two women who saw a live crab in a supermarket fridge shrink-wrapped and trying to escape and were horrified to find out that this treatment was totally legal.

So is keeping crustaceans in unregulated, overcrowded, skungy tanks and letting untrained supermarket shoppers boil, steam, amputate and barbecue them alive. Because presumably we have to eat them as fresh as possible.

And Ben says lobster meat does present challenges that beef and pork don't. The animal itself, you know, has certain limitations in the way we can store it. The very simple thing to say is, you know, there is a difference between seafood meat, if you like, and land mammal meat. In short, seafood meat starts to break down and get smelly and mushy much more quickly than

than land mammal meat. When Ben uses the highly scientific term "seafood meat," it's important to know that he's talking about all seafood. It's not just lobsters that get stinky quickly. It's about the same in crustaceans of any variety and with fish. We are very accustomed to frozen fish, but I'm also thinking like frozen shrimp, frozen... Why not frozen lobsters?

Nobody really knows is the blunt thing to say. There seems to be this expectation of they're eaten as fresh as possible. Ben says there's no scientific reason that a lobster needs to be killed immediately before eating any more than a salmon or trout or shrimp does. It's mostly convention and our ideas about freshness that keep lobster tanks a thing.

And even if a just-killed lobster does taste better, we wouldn't kill a chicken or a turtle or a fish right by our table just because it's a little yummier.

And Ben says that when lobsters get boiled alive, they can feel all of it. Science in the last 10 years has demonstrated that these animals are sentient. In other words, that they feel pain, they feel joy, they have complex neurological systems. Ben's organization isn't advocating that people stop eating lobster altogether. But he does want lobsters to be treated like every other animal, who don't have to experience the supply chain alive.

He says the relatively compassionate way to eat these crustaceans is to kill them soon after they've been caught. What do you find is the biggest sticking point when you're like talking to people? Is it just that people are used to it being celebratory and expensive and they don't want to give it up? People find it very difficult to relate to a crab or a lobster or a prawn. I think what you're looking at is if you like an inside out animal, its skeleton is on the outside because that's the protection it has.

So I think people actually have some difficulty really just becoming aligned with that animal. You know, when you look at a land animal, when it's fluffy or looks at you with big brown eyes or whatever, you know, you can kind of put your anthropogenic view onto that animal. You can ascribe human feelings to it. Or maybe another way to put it is lobsters look like giant bugs, like sentient rocks. And that means they're just not quite cute enough to be considered.

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We have a Slate Plus episode available to subscribers right now that's all about something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Gift guides. I really like gift guides, but there were so many this year, it started to weird me out.

And I was lucky enough to be able to talk through my ambivalence with the culture critic Anne Helen Peterson, who has been thinking and writing about and making gift guides for her newsletter, A Culture Study. It becomes less and less of a lift if you think about it, because you're like, oh, I'm going to click on the best gift guides. And then I can just like keep clicking and not actually doing anything. I can keep like soft brain scrolling instead of

reading an article, reading the book that I actually want to be reading at this time. You know what I mean? Oh, my God. The book I'm supposed to be reading at this time has been sitting on the side of my bed for like days. All I'm doing is looking at the things to buy.

You can listen to me and Annie think through gift guides, why there are so many and how they make us feel by signing up for Slate Plus right now. Gift guide season may be over for the time being, but trust me, the gift guide deluge is not. It's coming back next year and the year after and the year after that. If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page or

or visit Slate.com slash Decoder Plus to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, so sign up now. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at DecoderRing at Slate.com. This episode was produced by Max Friedman and Sophie Codner. Decoder Ring is also produced by me, Evan Chung, and Katie Shepard. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

Be well, and we'll see you next year. - Hi, it's Carvel from Slate's How To Podcast. Are you ready for a fresh start in 2025?

To celebrate the new year, Slate is offering an extended free trial of Slate Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts. As a Slate Plus member, you'll get ad-free listening on every Slate show, solve life's toughest problems on How To, get advice you actually want to follow on Dear Prudence, keep your pulse on the zeitgeist with Culture Gab Fest, and navigate the big questions of life with Death, Sex, and Money, all uninterrupted.

Plus, starting this month, HowTo is releasing bi-weekly bonus episodes exclusively for Slate Plus members. That means more advice, more experts, and more stories to help you tackle life's challenges head on. Don't miss out. Try Slate Plus for free now on Apple Podcasts or visit slate.com slash howtoplus to get access wherever you listen.

Hi, I'm Josh Levine. My podcast, The Queen, tells the story of Linda Taylor. She was a con artist, a kidnapper, and maybe even a murderer. She was also given the title The Welfare Queen, and her story was used by Ronald Reagan to justify slashing aid to the poor.

Now it's time to hear her real story. Over the course of four episodes, you'll find out what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name. The great lesson of this for me is that people will come to their own conclusions based on what their prejudices are. Subscribe to The Queen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.