A lobster festival is an event organized to celebrate the animal and food known as lobster. These events are most common in Maine or coastal Southern California. Sometimes, a lobster festival can be focused on celebrating the lobster industry, and sometimes it is mainly about lobster-related food. A lobster festival is usually large and often accompanied by a carnival, and often features lobster-themed events including contests, displays, and awards ceremonies. At a lobster festival, food vendors and lobster sellers often showcase different ways of cooking with lobster.
With a hard shell on the outside and soft meat inside, lobsters are a lot like hefty sea bugs. A lobster is a crustacean that lives at the bottom of a body of water, scavenging food like mussels and dead fish. Usually found in rocky areas, the lobster is caught using traps with bait in them. Mackerel, tuna, and salmon are the most common types of bait used to catch lobster. The meat of a lobster is rich in many nutrients, but can contain harmful contaminants if the water in which it grew was not clean.
Lobster is known as a luxury dish when it is ordered cooked fresh from a live lobster tank, but it also appears in a great number of other dishes and food items. Common ways of preparing lobster include steaming, baking, and pan cooking or sauteing the lobster. Though it is best known served in its whole form, shell and all, lobster is used in many types of dishes, including unexpected dishes like soups, stews, and pizzas. The most common flavors used with lobster are butter, garlic, and lemon. Tarragon, thyme, and dill commonly appear on lobster dishes in restaurants.
Many fun food-centric festivals exist all over the world to celebrate regional favorite foods and important regional food industries. The lobster festival is just one of many types of festivals created to honor cooking with seafood. Other types of seafood festivals include shellfish festivals celebrating oysters and clams and festivals for different types of fish. Festivals are not limited to seafood, as almost every food item people use has a festival somewhere that celebrates it.
