Olympia Snowe to Admiral Ackbar: Stop Looking Like a Lobster

Protectionism is really one of my favorite isms. It's nearly impossible to couch one's regionalism/nationalism in language that makes the speaker look anything but a fool. With that, I yield the floor to the Senator from Maine.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, from the nation's leading lobster-producing state, Maine, wants U.S. restaurants to stop calling a type of seafood a lobster, because she says it isn't a lobster at all.

Snowe says a 2-inch shellfish known as "langostino lobster" is an impostor to the real thing, and she's asking the Food and Drug Administration to yank approval for restaurants to market the product as lobster on their menus.

"Langostino is not lobster, nor should it be marketed as such," Snowe wrote to FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach.

Langostino is Spanish for prawn, but Kristen Millar of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council says the langostino is actually a pelagic crab. To serve it up as lobster is an "insult to Maine and to the lobster industry," Millar said.

This is all pretty rich coming from Olympia Snowe, a chick who stole her first name from Washington State and her last name from Buffaloe, and who hails from the fraudulently named Vacationland. I'm more apt to confuse a sea monkey with Curious George than I am a 2-inch pelagic crab with a lobster.

Post title reference here.