There Was A Time,

when nobody ate lobsters openly,

they were cat food! in the 1600s and 1700s, writes Daniel Luzer for Pacific Standard, there were so many lobsters around Massachusetts Bay Colony, for instance, that they washed up on the beach in piles two feet high. “People thought of them as trash food,” Luzer writes, the ocean bugs were regarded as food for lower-class people and convicts, and used as fertiliser at times, 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, rumour 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 did indeed feed lobster to their cats, how times have changed!

and now the good or bad news depending whether you are eating or catching, the lobster population according to this article is booming, 

as an aside you may often hear of a super huge lobster being caught, like the one above, they are not caught very often and make the news is they are, so why do they grow so big? easy really, all lobster of the kind in the pictures grow large, but they are caught before they can get big, but once the lucky ones are too big to get into the lobster traps they continue to grow and because they can not enter the traps they are caught very rarely, so how big can a lobster grow? this article may help to answer that question.