The seafood dining experience has taken a turn in the tides. Now diners can actually see where their food came from thanks to a program that allows people to track their lobster dinner back to the place it came from and the fisherman who caught it.

A tagging system called Thisfish started in British Columbia with fish and expanded to lobster in the East Coast this past winter as a pilot project with the Canadian Council for Professional Fish Harvesters and the Maritime Fishermen's Union.

"The pilot project is getting tremendous feedback — absolutely tremendous feedback," said Ruth Inniss, Atlantic co-ordinator for Thisfish and employee of the Maritimes Fishermen's Union.

Once fishermen have trapped and pulled in their catch of the day, they put bands on the claws of the lobsters, which is a standard procedure, but these bands have plastic tags attached with an individual number. When diners receive their lobster dinners, they can input the code on thisfish.info and with a click of a button, information about the fisherman, when the lobster was caught, and the lobster fishing area, will be displayed.

"You can contact the fisherman if you like," Inniss said. "It's up to the fishermen how much information they put in their profile."

Inniss said Maritime lobsters have been traced in about 13 countries in over 170 cities.

Capt. Roger LeBlanc, a fisherman who lives in Meteghan River in southwest Nova Scotia, said most of his lobsters end up in the United States and Canada, but he said he's got some feedback from lobster-lovers in China, Japan, Korea and Belgium.

"The program is really good because we never knew where our lobsters were going and the consumer didn't know where they were coming from," LeBlanc said. "I had one comment that came back. They didn't know a lobster came out of the ocean."

"It started with 12 guys or something and since then we've had fishermen contact us wanting to get involved. We've had restaurants contact us that want access to tagged fish," Inniss said.

Inniss said they have two more pilot projects ready to go in Cape Breton and Gulf Nova Scotia, facing P.E.I., as soon as those fisheries open in the spring.