On Sunday morning, seafood lover Christopher Stracuzza arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport for a flight back home to Georgia. He had a cooler he checked as oversize luggage because Dinnah — the colossal 20-pound lobster he’d acquired that weekend — wouldn’t fit into anything smaller. Enter TSA, which dedicates an entire blog to pics of unusual items found in traveler’s luggage, and you can imagine what went down once agents discovered the contents inside:
The agent’s tweet went viral in a hurry, spawning a lot of weird news stories that basically said, Look at this freaking lobster. Stracuzza was personally unaware of Dinnah’s newfound fame; he only learned about the tweet from a friend, who he says called the next day and said, “Dude, your lobster is all over the internet.” He wasn’t thrilled $700 worth of dinner had been extracted from its container and turned into a meme. He’s happy the freewheeling TSA agent didn’t snap off a claw, but also, he tells the New York Times, “Just because it was labeled ‘live lobster’ doesn’t mean there could be a bomb in there.” For good measure, he adds, “They are dumb. They are like the dumbest people in the world.”
Lisa Feinman, the seafood-store owner who sold Stracuzza the catch, is also not happy. She posted a diatribe on Facebook telling that TSA agent to “mind his own business”:
Stracuzza also purchased 12 smaller lobsters from her, and Feinman says they were “purposefully packed on top” to keep all the crustaceans alive and maximally comfortable. “This agent (after seeing the contents on an X-ray machine, no doubt) had to dump out 12 other lobsters to get to this guy,” she fumes. “Seriously, nothing better to do?” The TSA contacted her to try to defuse the situation, but if that convo went anything like the statement they gave the Times, things could probably use some additional smoothing out: “We share images through social media to provide helpful travel tips and to better inform the traveling public about TSA’s mission.”
Luckily, Dinnah and his travel companions arrived unharmed in Savannah, where the Times reports Stracuzza hosted an epic, days-long lobster feast: First up was claw meat with drawn butter and Bud Light. The second night, Monday, was surf and turf. Night three, he did lobster macaroni and cheese, and for Wednesday’s finale, it was lobster rolls.
