Lobster fed to prisoners was grounded whole, with the shell, which contains a tremendous amount of ammonia. Pretty close to eating a bowl of crab soaked in urine with small pieces of shell tearing into your gums.
> Lobster fed to prisoners was grounded whole, with the shell,
No they weren't! It's a myth.
>In all my research on this subject, I cannot find a single source of lobster shells being crushed in the entire history of lobster canning, between a dozen books on the subject, encyclopedia entries, and two dozen articles about lobster canning. Lobster shells are made out of chitin and are entirely inedible. Furthermore, there is no economical reason for trying to mash up rock-hard lobster shells to ‘stretch’ an abundant product, especially in an era before industrial grinders were available.
>In the colonial times, lobsters were harvested from tidal pools by hand, and were in extreme abundance. They were fed to children, prisoners, and indentured servants. They were also often used as fertilizer and animal feed. According to food historian Kathleen Curtin, prisoners and indentured servants enacting laws to limit how often they were fed lobster is also a myth, and there isn’t a shred of documentation of it actually happening.
Edit: This post is wrong, that's a myth actually!