...
Show More
Wallace’s writing style takes some getting used to. He likes to abbreviate words in a way that would have made my college News Writing professor have conniption fits. The footnotes in this book are among the most excessive I have encountered in a popular work. (Think page-long footnotes.) The final essay is laid out in a bizarre and visually distracting way that looks sort of like maze or a chemistry diagram. Some of the essays are also in desperate need of pruning—Wallace’s experiences riding with the 2000 McCain campaign, or his piece on the surprisingly political dictionary business, could have been interesting and enlightening if they weren’t so damn long.
The best essay, and the one that interested me most personally, is the titular work, “Consider the Lobster.” In what is perhaps history’s most thought-provoking and reflective report from the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks the tough questions and challenges readers to ponder the most important question behind this touristy celebration – is this animal cruelty?
Wallace shatters some of the mythos of lobster—such as the idea that it is a classy dish, the marine equivalent of steak. Lobster in fact was a low-class food, served to the institutionalized and prisoners, until the 1800s. Now of course, it has a world-class marketing campaign. However, what may be the biggest lie behind lobster is that the animals feel nothing when they are dropped into scalding water as a necessary component of their “preparation.”
The program of the MLF actually makes the claim that lobsters cannot feel pain. Big surprise here—the industry claim is false, Wallace reports:
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is either false or fuzzy. … Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.
(Interestingly, while lobsters are often compared to bugs, most insects do not possess nociceptors, whereas lobsters apparently do.) Later, he notes:
Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace.
However, enough people are apparently unaware of this that the “World’s Largest Lobster Cooker,” in which live lobsters are tossed to be steamed alive throughout the event—is a popular family attraction at the MLF. The author challenges us:
Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.
Lobsters’ claws are bound as they await the pot, which the author compares to debeaking of chickens, dehorning of cattle, and tail cutting of pigs in that it serves essentially the same function of hobbling animals who would otherwise lash out at each other in highly crowded, stressful conditions. However, as Wallace acknowledges, lobsters still have it much better than factory-farmed animals. Unlike the vast majority of pigs and poultry, lobsters at least get to live freely most of their lives before capture; every waking moment of their lives is not lived in utter misery.
However, also unlike pigs and poultry, lobsters are also the only commonly-consumed animal who is most often killed by their preparers. And they do not go quietly into that steaming pot.
The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain … According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 40 seconds to die in boiling water.
Some of the more guilty lobster eaters have come up with a method of chopping the animal between the eyes before cooking him. They believe this somehow renders the lobster insensible to pain. In fact, I once read a newspaper article about an “animal rights activist” restaurateur who demanded that all lobsters served at her eateries undergo this procedure before boiling. Ignoring the fact that this woman is decidedly not an animal rights activist, the essential problem here is the cutting is of no help to the lobster.
But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.
However, some don’t even attempt a symbolic mercy.
[T]here are even worse/crueler ways to prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive … Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe – some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts into the pot.
After some more discussion about pain and what a lobster’s sensation of it may be, Wallace presents us with a fantastic line:
Still, after all the abstract intellection, these remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.
And that’s what it all boils (pun intended) down to. As an animal advocate, I go by the “if it walks like a duck” analogy: if a creature acts as if it can experience pain and fear, it more than likely can—-therefore, give it the benefit of the doubt.
At the end of the essay, Wallace challenges his fellow omnivores about their thoughts (or more likely, lack thereof) about the morality of eating animals. And really, getting people thinking is the only thing we can ask for.
The best essay, and the one that interested me most personally, is the titular work, “Consider the Lobster.” In what is perhaps history’s most thought-provoking and reflective report from the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks the tough questions and challenges readers to ponder the most important question behind this touristy celebration – is this animal cruelty?
Wallace shatters some of the mythos of lobster—such as the idea that it is a classy dish, the marine equivalent of steak. Lobster in fact was a low-class food, served to the institutionalized and prisoners, until the 1800s. Now of course, it has a world-class marketing campaign. However, what may be the biggest lie behind lobster is that the animals feel nothing when they are dropped into scalding water as a necessary component of their “preparation.”
The program of the MLF actually makes the claim that lobsters cannot feel pain. Big surprise here—the industry claim is false, Wallace reports:
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is either false or fuzzy. … Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.
(Interestingly, while lobsters are often compared to bugs, most insects do not possess nociceptors, whereas lobsters apparently do.) Later, he notes:
Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace.
However, enough people are apparently unaware of this that the “World’s Largest Lobster Cooker,” in which live lobsters are tossed to be steamed alive throughout the event—is a popular family attraction at the MLF. The author challenges us:
Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.
Lobsters’ claws are bound as they await the pot, which the author compares to debeaking of chickens, dehorning of cattle, and tail cutting of pigs in that it serves essentially the same function of hobbling animals who would otherwise lash out at each other in highly crowded, stressful conditions. However, as Wallace acknowledges, lobsters still have it much better than factory-farmed animals. Unlike the vast majority of pigs and poultry, lobsters at least get to live freely most of their lives before capture; every waking moment of their lives is not lived in utter misery.
However, also unlike pigs and poultry, lobsters are also the only commonly-consumed animal who is most often killed by their preparers. And they do not go quietly into that steaming pot.
The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain … According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 40 seconds to die in boiling water.
Some of the more guilty lobster eaters have come up with a method of chopping the animal between the eyes before cooking him. They believe this somehow renders the lobster insensible to pain. In fact, I once read a newspaper article about an “animal rights activist” restaurateur who demanded that all lobsters served at her eateries undergo this procedure before boiling. Ignoring the fact that this woman is decidedly not an animal rights activist, the essential problem here is the cutting is of no help to the lobster.
But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.
However, some don’t even attempt a symbolic mercy.
[T]here are even worse/crueler ways to prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive … Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe – some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts into the pot.
After some more discussion about pain and what a lobster’s sensation of it may be, Wallace presents us with a fantastic line:
Still, after all the abstract intellection, these remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience.
And that’s what it all boils (pun intended) down to. As an animal advocate, I go by the “if it walks like a duck” analogy: if a creature acts as if it can experience pain and fear, it more than likely can—-therefore, give it the benefit of the doubt.
At the end of the essay, Wallace challenges his fellow omnivores about their thoughts (or more likely, lack thereof) about the morality of eating animals. And really, getting people thinking is the only thing we can ask for.
