OUT IN THE SORT.(couriers)(Column)

In an all but windowless building beside the open ocean in Arichat, Nova Scotia, a million lobsters are generally in residence, each in a private apartment where temperatures are maintained just above the freeze point. In a great high-ceilinged room known as the Dryland Pound, the lobster apartments are in very tall stacks, thirty-four levels high, divided by canyonlike streets. The size of the individual dwellings varies according to the size of the inhabitants; and there in the cold dark, alone, they use almost no energy and are not able to chew off their neighbors' antennae or twist off their neighbors' claws, as lobsters will do in a more gregarious setting. The cold water comes down from above and, in a patented way, circulates through the apartments as if they were a series of descending Moorish pools. Beguiled into thinking it is always winter, the lobsters remain hard, do not molt when summer comes, and may repose in Arichat for half a year before departing for Kentucky.

They belong to a company called Clearwater Seafoods, which collects them from all over the Maritime Provinces, including Nova Scotia's Cape Breton County, where Arichat is, on an island called Madame. Clearwater has a number of offshore licenses, its deep-sea trawlers fifty to two hundred miles out, tending mile-long lines of traps, and enhancing Clearwater's catch of lobsters that weigh three to fifteen pounds. A twenty-plus-pounder is rare but not unknown.

Sixty people work in the Arichat plant, sometimes around the clock. The manager is a big rugged guy named David George, who was wearing an N.Y.P.D. T-shirt when I met him and who summed up his operation, saying, "We go through a shitload of lobsters in a two-month period." From Clearwater's headquarters in Bedford, beside Halifax, I had driven up to Arichat with Mark Johnson, manager of Clearwater Lobster Merchants, New Covent Garden Market, Battersea; Dominique Bael, of Clearwater's La Homarderie, Quai des Usines, Brussels; and Marc Keats, the company's chief of European lobster sales. Lobsters were arriving at the rate of a hundred thousand a day, and each acceptable newcomer--its antennae waving, its carapace glistening--was given discrete space on a conveyor belt designed to advance its journey toward someone's distant mouth. The sensitized, computerized belt was, among other things, weighing the lobsters and assigning each by weight to one of sixteen grades. Lobsters graded "select" weigh between two and two and a half pounds. Chix all weigh just over or under a pound and are graded as large chix, medium chix, and small chix. A large quarter is a pound-and-a-quarter lobster that is an ounce or two on the heavy side. A small quarter is a light one. A large half weighs a little over 1.6 pounds. As the lobsters fly along the conveyor belt, computer-brained paddles reach out and sweep them variously left or right off the belt and into chutes that lead to large trays partitioned to accommodate lobsters of their exact heft. Biologists hover around the belt. The lobsters have a long way to live.

Clearwater once shipped lobsters to a Nobel Prize dinner. The company's delivered price was cheaper than the price of Swedish lobsters. Now and again, a lobster with claws the size of bed pillows goes to Japan to be featured in a display, but what the Japanese want in steady volume are chix. The world at large wants chix and quarters. Americans, almost alone, want the big ones. Clearwater lobsters go weekly to Guam. They go to Tel Aviv, Bangkok, Osaka, Los Angeles, Sioux Falls, Phoenix, Denver, Missoula, Little Rock, Brooklyn, and Boston. Lobsters are to Christmas dinners in France what turkeys are in America. On the eve of Christmas Eve, planes heading east for Paris have almost infinitely more lobsters in them than human beings. In annual consumption of lobsters, France is No. 1 in Europe. Clearwater has two customers in France, and is not looking hard for a third. An impression seems to be that the French are cheap and they want cheap lobsters. Moreover, when invoices go out it's a long time to the first euro. You will not find an ad for Clearwater in Cuisine et Vins de France. Christmas is also lobster time in much of the rest of Europe, and even in Asia. Lobsters are routed from the Dryland Pound to Louisville to Anchorage to Seoul. They go to Mexico, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Spain. By the truckload, they go to Maine!

Four hundred thousand pounds a year pass through Clearwater's reservoir in New Covent Garden, Mark Johnson remarked, while we watched three-pounders and four-pounders scrolling by on their way to Las Vegas. In England, he mainly sells large quarters. Marks & Spencer is his biggest customer. Second is British Airways. On a Restaurant Magazine list of the fifty finest restaurants in the world, thirteen were in England, and six of those were customers of Clearwater lobsters.

The rationale of the Dryland Pound is to make hard, healthy lobsters available to the market year round, overcoming the impediments of Clearwater's short fishing seasons and nature's cyclical shrinking of lobsters' internal meat. The Clearwater harvest takes place for a couple of months in springtime and again in November-December. The harvest in Maine takes place all year. When a lobster becomes so fully meated that it begins to overcrowd its carapace, it molts--generally in summer. First, its meat shrinks radically and is softened by absorbed water. The shrivelled and softened flesh is able to come out of the shell. In Halifax, these rudiments were reviewed for us by Sharon Cameron, a biologist on the faculty of Clearwater's Lobster University, whose students were company personnel and customers on visits to headquarters from around the world. Recovery--the regrowth of flesh and the hardening of the new and larger shell--requires two months. As lobsters age and grow--five to seven years for each pound--years can go by between molts. The premium, tenderest lobsters are within a few months of their recovery after molting. Clearwater harvests only hard lobsters. Since there is no way to tell if a hard lobster molted three months ago or three years ago, chefs undercook the big ones, because they are tenderest when raw.

Professor Cameron slipped a needle into the belly of a lobster, drew blood, and squeezed it into a refractometer. The more blood protein, the longer you can store the lobster, she said. Clearwater's harvests take place when blood protein is highest. "The U.S. fishes mostly in summer, when blood protein is lowest. Convenience is the reason. They're not doing it for lobster quality. They're doing it for their own convenience."