Is it a robot? Probably not.

But I want one.

From The Secret Life of Lobsters

These enormous devices, built by Avure Technologies, are called hydrostatic pressure processing (HPP) systems. They come in several models. The entrepreneur mentioned in my article, John Hathaway of Shucks Maine Lobster, is the proud owner of the Avure 215L — which weighs 80,000 pounds and is 16 feet tall.

The HPP technology was initially developed by the U.S. Army to make better-tasting MREs (”meals ready to eat”) for the troops. The science of it is relatively simple. If a piece of food is immersed in water, and the water is then squeezed to high enough pressure, pathogens and bacteria will be neutralized, but the food will be otherwise unaffected.

You press the start button on an Avure machine. Powerful pumps whir, and inside a narrow tube in the center of the machine, the water pressure is compressed to several times the pressure found in the deepest trenches in the ocean. The microscopic bugs in your meal all die, giving the food extended shelf life, and reducing the need for artificial preservatives.

At the same time, all the muscle flesh inside the lobsters conveniently separates from the shell. For the first time in human history, people have finally devised way to extract the meat of a lobster without cooking it.

When the lobsters come out of the Avure machine after a minute or two, the result is arresting. Every piece of meat can easily be extracted from the shell, raw and fully intact, including the leg muscles.

As a friend of mine put it: It’s a crustacean without the crust.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.