The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.13 As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival14 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.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. 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).15 A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider.16 One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talked about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.)
There are, of course, other fairly common ways to kill your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness. Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to render it insensate—and is said at least to eliminate the cowardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water and then fleeing the room. As far as I can tell from talking to proponents of the knife-in-the-head method, the idea is that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a willingness to exert personal agency and accept responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it. (There’s often a vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro-knife arguments.) 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. Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold salt water and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are going mostly on the analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold.
Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking several extra vent holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). 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 in the pot.
And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion number one. 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. “Thus,” in the words of T.M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “it is that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.” And lobsters do have nociceptors,17 as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain.
Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility: It could be that their lack of endorphin/enkephalin hardware means that lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically different from mammals’ that it may not even deserve the term pain. Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally different way than you and I. These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that they feel it but don’t feel anything about it—the point being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they want to get away from. Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/dislike/want to avoid.
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there 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. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.18 The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.
Lobsters, however, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best.19 And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light: If a tank of food lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.
Last edited by Tinordi; 01-18-2013 at 01:11 PM.
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I'm going to love hearing the justifications from those who read the essay.
I read it and it raised some interesting points, but, ultimately, I don't care. Lobster is delicious when cooked properly and served with melted butter, so I'll continue to eat it. I'd prefer that they be killed as humanely as possible and have always gone with the knife to the head method for that purpose, but, if that article is true, I guess I don't need to bother doing that any more.
I don't need to justify it, I'm a member of a predator species that feeds on the lower members of the food chain, I've evolved to the point that I don't have to do the killing anymore, someone else does it for me.
If a pack of Lobsters manages to grab me and drop me in a boiling pot of water before dipping my body in hot butter and eating me then that's just the way it is.
There are some prep methods that I have a lot of trouble with, ie Veal and Fois Gras or whatever you call it where there is a deliberate sadistic slant to the preperation. But dropping a lobster in boiling water to me isn't much different from cow prep, or even to an extent hunting.
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I'm going to love hearing the justifications from those who read the essay.
I don't need any justifications. I view all meat I eat the same way; I dont' care how it gets extracted from the animal, I only care how it tastes when prepared. Humans didn't get to the top of the food chain by NOT killing animals and eating them. Of course they're going to suffer when you kill them. You'd be naive to think they wouldn't. But meh, not my problem. I'm not a lobster.
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Justifications so far, I don't care if another animal may suffer alot for me to eat it because a) it's delicious or b) I'm at the top of the food chain.
I'm going to love hearing the justifications from those who read the essay.
One question,
Is the desire to get out of Hot Water a pain response or part of their migratory practice of seeking out certain temperatures of water. And does the intensity of this reponse vary with the temperature.
Interpeting a flicking of the tail as discomfort may not be correct. Are we in discomfort when someone hits our knee and our leg kicks out uncontrollably?
My policy is kill humanely where possible and know where your food come froms. If you would be uncomfortable visiting the slaugherhouse you probably shouldnt be eating meat. My grandparents raised animals for food so living in that enviroment you generally get the concept of having respect for the animal and eating the animal aren't mutally exclusive.
Is the desire to get out of Hot Water a pain response or part of their migratory practice of seeking out certain temperatures of water. And does the intensity of this reponse vary with the temperature.
Interpeting a flicking of the tail as discomfort may not be correct. Are we in discomfort when someone hits our knee and our leg kicks out uncontrollably?
My policy is kill humanely where possible and know where your food come froms. If you would be uncomfortable visiting the slaugherhouse you probably shouldnt be eating meat. My grandparents raised animals for food so living in that enviroment you generally get the concept of having respect for the animal and eating the animal aren't mutally exclusive.
I remember way back when I worked at a restuarant one of my buddies threw a whole bunch of lobsters into a big pot of boiling water, and you could hear them screaming for their life. It was pretty awesome.
I remember way back when I worked at a restuarant one of my buddies threw a whole bunch of lobsters into a big pot of boiling water, and you could hear them screaming for their life. It was pretty awesome.
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I remember way back when I worked at a restuarant one of my buddies threw a whole bunch of lobsters into a big pot of boiling water, and you could hear them screaming for their life. It was pretty awesome.
That's actually a myth, that's the sound of their shells expanding due to heat change.
Not screaming.
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Justifications so far, I don't care if another animal may suffer alot for me to eat it because a) it's delicious or b) I'm at the top of the food chain.
Ethicists, we are not.
It's not only that, though. The real answer is that there is no more humane way to kill a lobster than to boil or steam it. If there were, we'd probably be doing that instead, but I'm still not convinced that a boiled lobster suffers any more than a slaughtered pig or cow or chicken, so I'm really not sure what your/DFW's point is, unless it's that we should all be vegetarians. If that's where you're going with it, then it really is as simple as saying that we're at the top of the food chain. We've been eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years because that's what humans do, and I have no interest in trying to change that. (to briefly address Devil's Advocate's point, humans have not been kicking dogs for hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven't evolved to benefit from kicking dogs)
I generally do try to eat sustainable seafood, I'd never eat an endangered animal, I would try not to eat any species that I've owned as a pet (though I recognize that this is a somewhat arbitrary line to draw, and I'd make an exception in certain circumstances) and I hope that any food is killed in the most humane way possible. I don't see any of those rules as conflicting with eating a steamed lobster, though, and I certainly won't be feeling guilty while I'm doing it tomorrow.
