Why turtle soup disappeared: An elite, rare delicacy intersected with the advent of industrial canning, leading to supply exhaustion and backlash in consumer sentiment

Phil Edwards, a video producer for Vox, always has interesting, well-produced topics. Here, he goes into some of the history of turtle soup (with a slight antarctic detour). Turtle soup used to be on the menu at fancy restaurants everywhere in the 19th century, as well as canned in the early 20th century, but has now all but died out.

Some interesting things I learned from this:

• Mock turtle soup often used calf heads in place of turtle, and is the source of the cow-headed mock turtle in Alice in Wonderland.
• In England, turtle soup originally used large green sea turtles, but as these became rare (because all the ones harvested were mature adults) Americans started substituting snapping turtles and later terrapins.
• Some of the impetus for sea turtle protections were because of sea turtle canneries, in addition to concerns over plastic (like the soda/beer can rings).