Oysters were what you ate when you could not afford meat, and lobster was fed to prisoners
Pescobar in Camden holds a 4.7 from two hundred and fifteen people, charges twenty to eighty pounds, and it is a seafood bar.
And essentially everything expensive on the menu was, within living memory of somebody’s grandmother, food for people with no money.
Oysters
Which were, in Victorian London, the cheapest protein available.
They were sold from barrows, by the dozen, for pennies. They were eaten by the poor in enormous quantities. They went into pies as a bulking agent, to make the meat go further – and steak and oyster pie is not a luxury dish, it is a recipe for making a small amount of beef feed a family.
Dickens has a character observe that poverty and oysters always seem to go together.
What happened
The beds collapsed.
They were fished, relentlessly, for a century – and the native oyster fishery of England was destroyed by overfishing, disease and pollution, and it has never recovered.
And a food that was so abundant it was fed to the poor became scarce, and scarcity is the entire mechanism of luxury.
The oyster did not become fashionable because tastes changed. It became fashionable because we ate almost all of them.
Lobster
Which is the more famous version of the same story.
In colonial New England, lobster was regarded as garbage. It was fertiliser. It was fed to livestock, to servants, and to prisoners.
And there are accounts – repeated widely, and the Prat has learned to be careful with these – of indentured servants having clauses in their contracts limiting how often they could be fed it.
Whether every version of that story is true, the underlying position is not disputed: lobster was cheap, it was low-status, and eating it marked you.
What changed it was the railway, and then tinning, and then the ability to move a live lobster inland – and it became a delicacy in the interior precisely because it was hard to get there.
The finding
Seven postcodes and seven hundred and twenty-seven articles.
Nothing is expensive because it is good. It is expensive because it is scarce.
Purple came from rotting snails, and cost more than gold, until an eighteen-year-old made it in a flask by accident.
And oysters went the other way. They were the food of the poor until we ate them all.
Verdict
Excellent seafood, strong number.
Go, and eat an oyster, and know that Dickens thought it was a mark of poverty.
Fish and chips
Which is the same story and which is the last survivor of it.
It was working-class food, and it was working-class food precisely because it was cheap – and it was cheap because the trawlers were landing enormous quantities of fish and the railways could move it inland overnight.
And it was one of the very few foods not rationed during the Second World War, because the government judged that removing it would do more damage to morale than it was worth.
Churchill is said to have called it the good companions.
And the fried fish came, in very substantial part, from the Jewish East End, and the chips from the north – and the combination is one of the few genuinely successful pieces of British culinary fusion, and nobody thinks of it as one.
Bethan Morgan is an experienced satirical journalist and comedy writer with a strong editorial voice shaped by London’s writing and performance culture. Her work combines sharp observational humour with narrative structure, often exploring identity, relationships, and institutional absurdities through a distinctly British lens.
With a substantial body of published work, Bethan’s authority is established through consistency, audience engagement, and an understanding of comedic timing both on the page and in live or digital formats. Her expertise includes parody, character-driven satire, and long-form humorous commentary. Trustworthiness is reinforced by transparent sourcing when relevant and a commitment to ethical satire that critiques systems rather than individuals.
Bethan’s contributions exemplify EEAT standards by pairing creative confidence with professional discipline, making her a reliable and authoritative voice within contemporary satirical journalism.
