4 Foods Floridians Loved in the 1950s but Wouldn’t Touch Today

Florida wildlife officials are taking applications through October 15 for this year’s goliath grouper permit lottery.

It wasn’t always this complicated.

Back in the 1950s, a Florida dinner table looked a lot different.

These are the foods Floridians loved in the 1950s but wouldn’t touch today.

1. Green Turtle Steak and Soup

Key West’s canneries had been turning green sea turtles into steak and soup since the early 1900s, and the business was still running through the 1950s.

Grocery shelves carried canned turtle soup, and restaurants up and down the Keys put turtle steak on the menu without a second thought.

Nobody thought twice about it.

Local turtles ran so scarce that suppliers had to bring in turtles caught off the Caribbean and Nicaragua instead.

A historical marker at the old cannery site in Key West confirms it.

That whole trade ended once the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973, led federal wildlife officials to list the green sea turtle as threatened in 1978.

That listing made it a federal crime to kill, sell, or serve one.

Public opinion had already started turning two decades earlier, after University of Florida biologist Archie Carr’s research revealed just how slowly sea turtles grow and breed.

Reaching breeding age takes decades, not years.

Carr’s 1956 book on the subject, The Windward Road, inspired a small advocacy group called the Brotherhood of the Green Turtle that same year.

Sea turtles still carry that same federal protection today, so a plate of turtle steak isn’t coming back to a Florida menu.

2. Sea Turtle Eggs

Florida families targeted sea turtle eggs, not just turtle meat, going back to an 1860 territorial law.

That law banned “catching fish for the roes only, or turtles for the eggs only.”

The eggs alone were worth a special trip nearly a century before the 1950s.

Floridians who grew up on the coast in the 1950s remember gathering them as an ordinary summer habit, not a crime.

Early state laws tried to slow egg-hunting as far back as 1907, but enforcement was thin.

The practice stayed rampant for decades after, per the Sea Turtle Conservancy’s history of Florida’s turtle laws.

Florida banned taking eggs during nesting season in 1959.

Federal protection followed nationwide in 1978, when green turtles were formally listed as threatened.

That habit didn’t disappear overnight.

Federal agents in Florida still make arrests over raided sea turtle nests, which says a lot about how recently egg-hunting counted as ordinary foraging instead of a felony.

3. Gopher Tortoise Stew

Families gathered gopher tortoises for the stew pot for generations.

Depression-era households nicknamed the dish “Hoover chicken” after the president they blamed for hard times.

The name stuck long after the Depression ended, and Minorcan and rural Cracker families in St. Augustine kept making the stew well into the twentieth century.

Slow-simmered meat, root vegetables, and whatever seasoning a household had on hand went into the pot.

Nobody wasted a bite.

Florida banned selling gopher tortoises in 1972.

By 1988, harvesting one for any reason was illegal statewide.

The gopher tortoise is now a state-listed threatened species, so that stew pot is retired for good.

4. Jewfish Dinner

Anglers and cooks spent decades hauling in giant grouper that everyone at the dock simply called jewfish.

The fish could grow past 700 pounds, and one catch could feed a crowd off a single fillet.

Restaurants fried it, smoked it, and served it as the day’s catch without anyone blinking at the name.

Overfishing crashed the population hard enough that Florida banned keeping one at all in 1990.

The American Fisheries Society renamed the fish goliath grouper in 2001, retiring the old name for good.

A Floridian today can’t walk up to a fish market and buy one.

Not anymore.

Wave of New Rules

Florida rewrote its wildlife rules across three decades, and the changes landed on one plate after another: Turtle eggs in 1959, gopher tortoises by 1988, goliath grouper in 1990.

Each law followed the same pattern.

Hunters pushed a species hard for years, and the population crashed.

Only then did the state step in.

It happened every single time.

One local animal came back from that same list.

The American alligator nearly disappeared by the 1960s.

It landed on the federal endangered list in 1967, the same stretch of years that ended turtle and tortoise hunting for good.

Its population recovered well enough that Florida reopened a regulated, statewide alligator harvest in 1988.

Farmed alligator shows up on menus across the state today, the one dish from that whole era that diners still gladly order.

Coquina Broth

St. Augustine families along Florida's Atlantic coast built a soup out of coquinas, the tiny clams that wash up along area beaches by the thousands.

A cook needed a full bucket of the little shells just to fill one pot, since each coquina holds barely a drop of broth on its own.

That's a lot of raking and rinsing for one dinner.

Smithsonian magazine now files coquina broth among old St. Augustine recipes from another era, alongside dishes like gopher tortoise stew.

Nothing about coquina harvesting is illegal today.

It's the labor that scared people off, not the law.

Almost nobody bothers anymore.

That bucket stays empty.

Legal Stand-Ins Today

Florida Keys menus still carry conch fritters and conch salad at nearly every waterfront restaurant.

None of that conch comes from local waters anymore.

Florida banned commercial conch harvesting in 1975 and outlawed recreational harvesting too by the mid-1980s, after decades of overharvesting wiped out the local supply.

It's still illegal to so much as disturb one in state waters today.

The conch on a Keys dinner plate now travels in from the Bahamas, Jamaica, or South America before it ever reaches the kitchen.