There's an interesting history there. People didn't used to eat them for exactly that reason (they were compared to insects). Lobster was used to fertilize fields.
Then, during the civil war, one of the staple foods the government managed to create in large quantities was canned lobster. After the war it became popular and, eventually, a delicacy.
Some other foods that were wildly unpopular until some combination of advertising campaigns or cooking methods to take advantage of the available cheap meat include: Chicken wings, bacon, and most BBQ including brisket.
They tried
After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by
asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year’s budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC
estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile’s history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016
report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Congressional Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell in the Senate and House Speaker John Boehner, leveraged the debt ceiling — a limit on the government’s borrowing ability that had to be raised — to insist that the Obama administration accept federal spending curbs.
Without a full committee markup, Rehberg introduced a
bill that provided $522.5 million to the stockpile, about 12% less than the previous year and $132 million less than the administration wanted. “Nobody got everything they wanted,” Rehberg said.
The sequestration and strict budget caps ended in 2018 (when there was a Republican in the Whitehorse... strange how the budget stopped being an issue)
During the Trump administration, the White House has consistently proposed cutting the CDC and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, which took over stockpile management from the CDC. Congress approved more stockpile funding than Trump’s budget requested in every year of his administration, for a combined $1.93 billion instead of $1.77 billion, according to budget documents.
The White House budget request for 2021, delivered in February as officials were already warning about the dangerous new coronavirus, proposed holding the stockpile’s funding flat at $705 million and cutting resources for the office that oversees it.
