Having been assigned a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, an expository (though not originally meant to be) essay on the ethics of boiling alive, slow boiling, lobotomizing, etc., live lobsters for human consumption, I find myself rather enthralled by the lobster industry.
The essay was published in 2004, shortly before the author's untimely suicide in late 2008, in an issue of the now dead Gourmet magazine. Wallace was commissioned by Gourmet to pay a visit to the world-famous Maine Lobster Festival, an almost appalling display of human gluttony at which, according to Wallace, more than 25,000 pounds of lobster is consumed.
Markedly, Wallace goes on, to summarize a ten-page essay, and explains, without taking a particular stand (a feat on its own), the masking of the festival's horrors by its marketers. He illustrates that while the baseline lobster meal served at the festival costs $12, it's served on a styrofoam tray with plastic silverware and styrofoam cups; too few napkins are given out, especially when the too-close eating quarters and ratio of children to food are considered. Most incredibly, however, I noted Wallace's ability to describe the process of cooking and eating a lobster without sugar-coating. He makes no effort to make the lobster seem cute, desirable, healthy, or even very tasty. He points out the historical significance of lobster as a food given only to peasants before around the 1800s, canned in the east and shipped to the west in the 1840s, and even of lobsters ground up and used for fertilizer by the pilgrims.
There is one passage, however, of particular interest to me:
"...Here is a question that's all but avoidable at the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does "all right" even mean in this context? It is all just a matter of individual choice?"
While I do think, after having read this essay, that the choice to consume lobster is indeed a deeply personal one, I cannot for the life of me justify throwing a live creature into a boiling vat of water and walking away while it attempts to claw its way out, thrashing and banging against the pot. Wallace cites in his article that it takes anywhere from 35 to 45 seconds for the lobster to die in such a way.
Imagine. Being thrown into a pot of scalding water, left there to struggle in agony for 45 seconds. Whether you're self-aware or not, it's a painful experience.
I couldn't help but compare in my mind this World's Largest Lobster Cooker to a hypothetical World's Largest Open Slaughter House Floor. I was pleased, as I read on in Wallace's essay, to find that he, too, had thought of this: The cooker can boil more than 100 live lobsters. Imagine, let's say, just 50 cows being slaughtered and cooked in the open like that. Or 50 pigs. Or deer. Or any other meat-bearing animal we consume. It just wouldn't happen.
But why is it, I wonder, that we don't call these other animals' meats by the same name as the animal? Cow. Pig. Deer. Beef. Pork. Venison. Do we do this, mainly with pork and beef, which are more highly restricted in the ways of killing and preparation than venison, to distance ourselves from the reality of the deaths of these creatures? Is it because we raise them ourselves? If that is the case, then what of chickens? Or is it because we look into their eyes the moment before we cut their throats, and we see some semblance of a cry for help, a silent, "Please?" As Wallace says in his footnotes on this issue, "...we eat these latter meats without having to consider that they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done."
On the other hand, we refer to beings we don't deem as "higher" the same way we refer to their meat: chicken, fish, and most relevantly, lobster.
Wallace, though, determines in his essay that lobsters, to sum it up, DO have pain receptors, DO show a primitive form of preference (to water temperature, light, etc.), and DO try to avoid unpleasant stimuli.
Now, I'm no PETA member or animal rights activist, because, honestly, I feel those types of people take things a little too far. While it is possible to suffice on vegetation and fruit, I don't find it personally pleasurable. However, I do take steps when possible (I do still live at home with my folks, after all) to be considerate to my animalian counterparts. My family purchases cage free organic eggs, organic-raised beef and pork, and meat without steroids or hormones. On the same note, we also support local dairy and vegetable/fruit farmers when possible. I believe these practices come from the influence upon my dad of the Inupiaq natives of the north (the farthest north, actually). These are a people who are highly conservative, incredibly graceful, strikingly resilient, and remarkably intelligent. They are also a grateful people, one of the only to have continued the practice of whaling to the present, who make use of every part of every animal they kill.
Evidenced in these people is something the heads of the MLF (and other meat eaters, not just eaters of lobster) forget-a respect for nature. There is a certain grace in raising an animal in a natural environment, where the animal is happy and relaxed, then butchering it in a humane way (for example, the way it is done in some European slaughterhouses-usually those that are family owned-by stunning the animal with a large amount of electricity to knock the animal unconscious before rendering it dead). But people of native status tend to take that a step even farther by thanking the animal itself in a prayer said before the final killing blow is delivered.
There may be something to be said about the method of lobster killing in which one (rather brutally) stabs the lobster in the head with a large knife, effectively where its "third eye" would be, though according to Wallace, this does not sever the ties with the nervous system that allow the lobster to feel pain. Quite simply, however, I feel there is nothing to be said about eating an ancient, bottom-feeding crustacean. I personally do not consume Caribbean or reef fish because many contain neurotoxins that can lead to many horrible diseases, including ciguatera, which can cause confusion in the senses of hot and cold, ataxia, hallucinations, and paresthesia. Being a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, a fishing port, I was also raised to avoid bottom-feeders for obvious reasons, and into this category falls the lobster. Whether one eats lobster are not, there are a few things one cannot deny: One lobster grants one human approximately one meal, making the killing of the creature seem like vanity. The lobster is effectively an ancient insect, which in itself is disgusting. And one can never be sure where that creature has been or what it has eaten.
As Wallace concludes, he poses a few more questions:
"Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions to gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat, but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands...? And for those gourmets who'll have no truck with conviction or rationales and who regard [this article] as just so much navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or it is just that they don't want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn't being extra and aware and attentive and thoughtful about one's food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet's extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?"
The necessity for meat consumption is debatable as alternative protein sources and methods of preparation arise, but there is nothing debatable in the fact that the omnivore does not consider on a regular basis, gourmet or not, where his or her food originated and whether or not it suffered. Nor does the gourmet care. The gourmet lifestyle is one built on luxury and lust, the selfish and the posh. The reluctance to consider this is no more a topic of debate than that. What was once called "gourmet," distinguished by the so-called awareness and attentiveness and thoughtfulness towards one's food, has now become nothing more than a game of the palate. And the gourmet's extra attention and "sensibility" is indeed only aesthetic and gustatory now. Perhaps I sound very harsh in saying so, and I should clarify that this point of view is meant to refer to those who eat and do not think. Those who raise and butcher their own livestock under free-roaming, cage-free conditions are gracefully exempt.
The connections within this battle of aesthetic/gustatory vs. morale, however, are, as Wallace states, highly abstract and subjective. But he is afraid in his writing as I am not. He ventures that to pose such question treads too-deep waters and explores places not meant for public discussion. But I find in myself a deeper voice that says that it is our duty on this earth to respect what we've been given (or scientifically granted, against all odds of the universe, if that's your thing) and to treat it as such, from the lowliest lobster to the greediest gourmet.
