Melted butter flows down luscious flesh, steam wafts from hard red shells; a spray of lemon awakens hidden passions. Ah, the lobster dinner. A fine meal and prelude to many a sheet-romp, but do we really stop and consider the sex lives of the critters we consume? Best-selling author Trevor Corson invited students to do just that, at an Oct. 5 lecture in Bryan Auditorium entitled “Steamy Lobsters and Succulent Sushi: How Can We Save the Seas through Sex?” The talk was sponsored by the International Studies Program.

I sat down with Mr. Corson to discuss his two books The Secret Life of Lobsters and The Story of Sushi, and how we can take measures to eat more sustainably.

I began by asking Corson about how he went from being a college student studying philosophy in China and Buddhism in Japan, to working as a commercial fisherman in Maine.

MB: After studying philosophy in East Asia you left academia and became a commercial lobster fisherman. What did you learn from that experience?

TC: It was during my second stay in Japan right after college that I realized that was not necessarily the best match for my personality. I also realized that after all this time in East Asia I was starting to get homesick.

I’d always had this childhood dream of working on a lobster boat, because I’d been to Maine in the summers. It was really hard work but I was able to write a book based on the experience, “The Secret Life of Lobsters.”

The lobstermen I wrote about operated this small scale local fishery with small boats, and they fished in a way that was sustainable. They protected female lobsters with eggs, threw them back. They caught a lot of lobsters, but they also did things to make sure the lobster population would remain healthy.

The fishermen were actually protecting the opportunity for lobsters to have sex, to reproduce and make more babies. They’re making sure that happens by protecting those mother lobsters. They want a lot of sex to be going on down there. As I was working on “The Story of Sushi,” I was thinking about those same issues of sustainability.

MB: So, following that, what are some little known facts about sushi?

TC: Almost all the facts about sushi are little known. Eating sushi in Japan is much more of a social experience and a surprising experience, because you get to know your sushi chef.

Also, sushi isn’t from Japan at all. It originated as a technique of preserving fish in Southeast Asia.

The U.S. military authorities were partly responsible for defining sushi as we know it today after World War II. Of all the sushi we have around the world now, there are all these regional varieties of different kinds of sushi in Japan, but it’s just this one Tokyo style sushi that we think of as all sushi. It’s actually only because of the U.S. occupation authorities who decreed that “this is sushi” arbitrarily.

MB: How can we eat more sustainably?

TC: Most fisheries are in really deep trouble. Some scientists are predicting that we’ll have run out fish completely by the year 2050- no more sushi, no more nothing.

Blue fin tuna, these beautiful, majestic fish, are just being wiped out by sushi consumption. Tuna was traditionally considered a garbage fish by the Japanese, not good enough for sushi.

We don’t need to be wiping out blue fin tuna for sushi; we can be eating other kinds of sushi that are more authentic and more interesting. I want to encourage people to start thinking about sustainability issues as they’re making choices about the seafood they’re ordering.

The more you know about the sex life of the critter, the more educated you can be about sustainability of eating it.