Fried Calamari

Fried calamari is an iconic restaurant appetizer across the United States, but that hasn’t always been the case. In the 1970s and ’80s, a handful of cephalopod supporters had to fight to move the needle on Americans’ squid squeamishness. Among these supporters were Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Paul Kalikstein, who outlined “The Marketability of Squid” in his graduate thesis, and reporter Florence Fabricant, whose 1978 appeal in The New York Times detailed the many practical perks of the “neglected seafood.” Several state and federal marine programs also encouraged restaurant chefs to replace overfished stocks with squid—and to call it by its more enticing Italian name, calamari—in an effort to buoy a struggling seafood industry.

These campaigns made their mark: By the mid ’90s you could find a plate of crispy rings and tentacles at any reliable sports bar or red-sauce joint in used a “Fried Calamari Index” to compare the trajectories of other trendy foods over time.