On December 12, criminals made off with a $400,000 shipment of lobster meat from a freight hub outside of Boston. It was the latest and most costly in a spate of striking seafood robberies afflicting New England—involving creating a fake trucking load, malware, a deceptively painted truck, and a great deal of intel and advance planning. More Ocean’s Eleven than Goodfellas, despite lobster seeming an almost comical choice for grand larceny.

But while this sensational and slightly perplexing crime has understandably made headlines, and would make a highly bingeable Netflix series, it also exposes a fundamental flaw in how our food system works. Providing American consumers with the bounty of food that lands on our plates on a daily basis is complicated, and freight trucking is an often overlooked ingredient: one that depends on a chaotic, poorly regulated market and the exploitation of its workforce of 3.5 million truck drivers.

Freight industry organizations point to sensational crimes as evidence that law enforcement needs to crack down on cargo theft, and now they’ve supposedly enrolled the increasingly aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the cause. But the growing vulnerability of American freight shipping to sophisticated and costly heists is less about poor law enforcement and more about waning state regulatory capacity. This under-regulation is what makes our food abundance possible in the first place.

Fresh lobster meat can cost between $40 and $90 per pound—slightly less if it’s still live or hasn’t been shelled—making a shipment of lobster worth vastly more than a comparable shipment of sirloin steak. But unlike the steak, at room temperature, within as little as two hours, lobster meat becomes a toxic bacteria bomb no amount of melted butter will repair. This short shelf life is a boon to thieves. Lobsters, unlike TVs and laptops, don’t have serial numbers (and unlike cows or pigs, they don’t have ear tags); once they’re off the truck and into the pot, they can’t easily be tracked, the evidence of any crime gobbled up or trashed within a few days. Consumers would have no way of knowing if they were eating contraband, and it wouldn’t be hard for savvy crooks to find restaurants, restaurant suppliers, and markets to absorb a truck of hot lobster amid the holiday festivities.

Many articles written in the wake of the lobster heist have emphasized that hijackings of food are a growing problem for the freight industry, as well as for insurers, groceries, restaurants, and ultimately consumers. “Affordability” is an odd word to use here—we’re talking lobster affordability, after all—but hijackings, like other forms of cargo theft, do incur higher overall costs for companies involved, much of which is ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. And cargo theft can afflict staple products as much as big-ticket ones. In the midst of surging egg prices this spring, for instance, thieves in Maryland

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